Karaite Pies and Samurai Swords: The Karaite Theme in David Shrayer-Petrov’s Life, Fiction, and Memoirs
Karaite Pies and Samurai Swords: The Karaite Theme in David Shrayer-Petrov’s Life, Fiction, and Memoirs

Summary/Abstract: David Shrayer-Petrov is a prolific Russian-Jewish writer, poet, litterateur and scientist. His novels, short stories and memoirs contain much information on the Crimean and Polish-Lithuanian Karaites. This article for the first time analyzes the Karaite theme in the publications of this important Russian-Jewish author. David Shrayer-Petrov came across the East European Karaites and their historical legacy at different times (from 1941-1943 to 1984) and in various geographical regions: in the Urals, Leningrad, Moscow, Crimea, and Lithuania. The Karaites and the picturesque myths surrounding the formation of their identity (from rigorous non-Talmudic Jews to a people with a bogus Turkic identity based on several pseudo-scholarly theories) produced a strong impression on the writer. When seen from this perspective, Trakai and Crimea of Shrayer-Petrov’s novels and memoir prose appear as isolated lieux de mémoire where a Jew can travel in order to put his own Jewishness to test by venturing there, passing this test – and remaining Jewish

• Details
• Contents