By the Marjanishvili Metro Stop in Tbilisi, Georgia, bevies of used-book buyers, collectors and enthusiasts commune daily amongst kiosks laden with antiquarian tomes. Stacked haphazardly across dozens of aluminum tables, the condition of these volumes ranges from “placed on a shelf for decoration” to “read with the enthusiasm of a Nabokov scholar annotating Dar.” Usually, when I make my way past the throngs of patrons browsing this textual potpourri, I avert my gaze so as to avoid spending three times my monthly income on Soviet reprintings of medieval Georgian literature. Last month, however, I couldn’t help myself. For a moment, my tunnel vision lapsed and my eyes fell on a towering stack of Jewish tamizdat from the 1970s. While such Russian-language editions of Jewish literature printed abroad aren’t exactly rare in the post-Soviet sphere, it struck me that these books, assembled side by side in one bookseller’s stall, must have originated as part of a single library.
I set my nose to the case and strutted across a few meters of marbled pavement to the shady alcove where the owner of the kiosk was standing. Pointing to the stack of tamizdat, I inquired how these works had entered his collection. While certainly affirming, his answer wasn’t exactly surprising. The Georgian-Jewish matriarch of a Tbilisian family had recently passed away and her children had sold the collection. In this sense, Marjanashvili’s kiosks operate according to the rules of booksellers the world over: unwanted book objects—long insulated from the logic of economic exchange behind the walls of family flats—are placed out in the open and assigned a price.
As families decided to emigrate and packed up their apartments, what was the fate of their books?
The Jewish tamizdat library stuck in my mind, though, not for the fact that it had entered the grasp of the bookselling economy’s barely visible hand, but for the implications that such a fate holds as researchers seek to engage with these collections of texts. In many ways, Jewish libraries of the Soviet epoch have become almost as widely dispersed as the descendants of those families who set out to collect them in the first place. With 291,000 Jews having departed by the Soviet Union by the 1988 and 1.7 million having departed the USSR’s successor states by 2018, demographic trends paint an extraordinarily vibrant picture of the population movements surrounding the Soviet collapse. But as families decided to emigrate and packed up their apartments, what was the fate of their books?
To constitute such disbanded personal libraries as a discrete object of scholarly inquiry serves not merely to flesh out the picture of what Soviet Jews read; it provides a window into the very means by which a Jewish reading public took shape in the late Soviet Union. Comparing the books that formed a Jewish family’s library in Tbilisi to those of a Jewish family in Moscow or Dushanbe illustrates the multifaceted texture of Jewish reading as it manifested across the USSR. Such reading practices were simultaneously grounded in the local, the Soviet, and the transnational. Indeed, bound up with family libraries are the textual vestiges of Soviet Jewish life in an era when the terms on which Soviet Jews lived were in the process of being upended. While a reading of such libraries can assist us in circumscribing a canon of texts that informed and shaped the experience of Jews during the late Soviet period, it is important to remember that personal libraries do not always have a science. They are both curated and contingent, ephemeral and ever-changing. Behind each book is the story of a spontaneous gift, an impulse purchase, a literary evening, a family heirloom. Such is the appeal of a family library, it forces consideration of how to negotiate the personal alongside the historical.
Indeed, for a recent cohort of scholars, the textual lives of Jews during the late Soviet Union has served as a sustained topic of interest. Marat Grinberg’s The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf (Brandeis University Press, 2022) provides perhaps the most direct engagement with questions of how Jewish reading practices were developed around collections of literature in the home. His approach advocates for untangling the complex reading strategies adopted by a Soviet Jewish public in consuming the formally published texts lining their own bookshelves. Other recent works such as Michael Beizer and Ann Komaromi’s A Time to Sow: Refusenik Life in Leningrad, 1979-1989 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) focus more closely on Jewish engagement with underground writing by examining communities that formed around Jewish attempts to emigrate during the late Soviet era and the practices of textual production the shaped them. Adopting a method grounded more in close readings of late Soviet and post-Soviet prose texts, Klavdia Smola’s Reinventing Tradition: Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2023) takes up the issue of how Russophone Jewish writing negotiated and innovated a new relationship to tradition following the Holocaust. What these works hold in common is a shared concern for the ways in which Jewish texts are entangled amongst themselves and the communities that read them. Indeed, it is in the sites of Jewish libraries that such engagements manifest themselves in a physical display.
My research on Jewish underground culture in the late Soviet Union has led me through the displaced stacks of many home libraries and illustrated the diverse afterlives that have befallen such collections. By and large, the pivotal moments charting the fate of these books have been intertwined with how they come to be perceived in times of emigration. As large waves of Jews left the Soviet Union from the 1970s onward, the books that constituted the basis of their intellectual lives became movable property to be managed. One had to decide which books were essential and which, while certainly not expendable, could serve to be left behind. Such decisions did not come easily.
Books were simultaneously a luxury and a necessity, spare items that could, in fact, not be spared.
Films such as Valery Todorovsky’s Liubov’ (Love) from 1991 immortalized such moments within pop culture of the epoch. In one of the work’s final scenes, the protagonist’s Jewish love interest asks her mother whether she can bring her books when the family emigrates to Israel. After her mother refuses, she angrily retorts, “fine, then I’m not taking anything.” (тогда я вообще ничего не возьму). Faced with weight restrictions on baggage, books were a particularly heavy item that could not be uniformly packed and transported. On purely practical level, they failed to satisfy any of everyday life’s pragmatic needs. Yet, while clothes, dishes, pots and pans could be repurchased after emigration, books in one’s mother tongue were not always for sale. Books were simultaneously a luxury and a necessity, spare items that could, in fact, not be spared. As is clear from Todorovsky’s film, the decision of which books to bring and which books to leave was both painstaking and emotional. If one couldn’t bring their books, then it was almost not worth taking anything.
The profound linkage between Soviet Jewish emigration and the fate of Soviet Jewish libraries has resulted in a particularly transnational set of pathways that the books in such collections have taken to reach their current terminus points. In most cases, as part of the emigration proceedings, family libraries needed to be partitioned and volumes abandoned. The books that remained went to friends, family, or the secondary market. Now, over three decades removed from the collapse of the Soviet project, even those parts of the personal library collection Jews emigrating from the USSR elected to bring along are facing an uncertain fate. The originators of these libraries have willed their collections to descendants that may not hold the linguistic competency to read them and for whom they are remnants of a bygone textual age. The books continue to take up space in the apartments that have to be emptied and sold. For many, the personal libraries carried by Jews through their emigration are an unwanted literary inheritance.
The question, then, remains: what should be done with an inheritance when it is no longer desired by its inheritors? Indeed, a complicating factor in the case of personal libraries accumulated by Jews in the Soviet Union is the uniqueness of the literary objects that constituted them. These collections were not just mass market Soviet printings of books sold in the tens of thousands. Rather, they included a significant offerings of underground texts received through local and transnational networks of literary exchange. On the Jewish bookshelves of the USSR, samizdat periodicals handtyped on onionskin paper sat alongside tamizdat books published abroad and Soviet pressed editions of Sholem Aleichem’s complete works in Russian translation. To varying degrees, such collections would also have been multilingual. They would have contained texts primarily in Russian and the myriad languages of the non-Russian Soviet republics, but also in Hebrew and Yiddish. While the diverse nature of personal collection would have both naturally suited the Jewish reading publics of the late Soviet Union and enriched their textual lives, they also present no single pathway of where such physical book objects should be held once they move beyond the realm of the personal library.
Different parts of these collections, of course, appeal to a variety of commercial and institutional actors. While university libraries may incorporate some works printed by Soviet or tamizdat publishing houses into their circulating collections, self-published samizdat text present more of a challenge. These handmade book objects are often fragile and sometimes rare, unable in many cases to be circulated amongst a student readership with the regularity of printed volumes from the stacks. The decision to incorporate such texts into an institutional collection requires specific conditions for access and preservation that are not always present. This is coupled with the fact that the uniqueness of such texts, which have often been printed in more reader-friendly editions during the late or post-Soviet era, often lies in their material form and marginalia laden pages. To take in such an item requires a desire to preserve the particular material artifacts of a historically contingent readership.
The stories of Soviet Jewish personal libraries trace the historical contours and currents that profoundly shaped the lives of their original owners.
The secondary book market presents a separate set of questions. Given that samizdat texts circulated through a gift economy, how should one assign monetary value to a text that was never sold? How should researcher access to rare materials be ensured as rare book objects circulate on the private market? What types of due diligence are required in preparing such objects for private sale?
Inherently, the movement of Soviet Jewish personal libraries into the commercial and public spheres marks a further point of rupture in the life of the collection. Texts that were once assembled, annotated, and consumed by a single community of readers have made their way onto the stacks of North American libraries as well as the bookstands outside of the Marjanishvili Metro Station in Tbilisi. Accumulated within a polity that no longer exists and amongst a reading public that has long dispersed, the stories of these collections trace the historical contours and currents that profoundly shaped the lives of their original owners. In this sense, while the dispersal of Soviet Jewish library collections presents challenges for researching the development of Soviet Jewish reading publics, the fate of these collections also offers a poignant postscript on the persisting textual legacies of the post-Soviet era.
Benjamin Arenstein is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago completing a joint-degree in the departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Middle Eastern Studies. His dissertation project explores the nature of Jewish underground cultural expression in the late Soviet Union. In particular, it examines how Jewish underground culture functioned on the Soviet periphery in cities such as Riga, Latvia; Tbilisi, Georgia; and Dushanbe, Tajikistan. In addition to his dissertation project, Arenstein is currently working on a manuscript of translated poems by the bilingual Hebrew and Russian author Elisheva Bikhovski (1888-1949).
