27 October 2004
“‘They say that when a child is in the mother’s stomach, it learns the entire Torah, but when it comes out, an angel strikes it on his lips and makes it forget,’ [Max] Berlin said recently. ‘That’s a good description for what happened to us. I am not starting anything new. I am only going back to our roots.'” Boris Fishman writes for the Forward about Max Berlin and a generation of Soviet Jewish immigrants who’re becoming observant, even orthodox — a major development in American Jewish life. Fishman is also the editor of an intriguing new collection of stories by Soviet immigrants, Wild East. Names you’ve seen before — Gary Shteyngart, Aleksander Hemon — brought together in a volume that foreshadows big changes in American literature.