Archive of Jewish History. Vol. 12

The 12th volume of the Archive opens with a study by Yefim Melamed (Kyiv) on the history of Stalinist secret services' surveillance of Jewish writers in the late 1930s and early 1950s, which resulted in repression and the physical destruction of many of them. In the appendix to his article, a unique material is published - reports of a secret agent who reported on the activities of the fellow-writers: Grigory Khan (Moscow) makes another contribution to the study of the ""endless"" topic: the Jews and the Russian revolution. His research is dedicated to Aaron Zundelevich (1852-1923), a prominent figure in the narodnik movement, a member of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya organization (lit. People's Will). Roberta de Giorgi (Udine, Italy) devoted her extensive research to the history of translations and publication of Leo Tolstoy's Three Tales, which, at the request of Sholom Aleichem, gave him for publication in a collection in favor of the Jews who suffered from the pogrom in Chișinău. The story turned out to be extremely intricate and fascinating, and it adds additional touches to the biography of Leo Tolstoy, Sholom Aleichem, as well as to the history of literary life and publishing in the early twentieth century. Maria Gulakova (St. Petersburg) publishes a letter from the ethnographer and public figure Moses Krol (1862-1942) to Chaim Zhitlowsky. Information contained in a letter from Krol (then an émigré in Paris) dated March 26, 1936, sheds light on a little-known attempt to organize the resettlement of European Jews in the 1930s in Ecuador. The published materials are based on documents extracted from various archives in Moscow, Kyiv, New York, Jerusalem and Leeds.