Gen­nady Estraikh is a for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Sovetish Heym­land who now teach­es at New York Uni­ver­si­ty. His con­cise book out­lines the devel­op­ment of intense Yid­dish lit­er­ary life in Com­mu­nist cir­cles dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s. Many Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­als saw in the dynam­ic new Sovi­et soci­ety a home where a sec­u­lar Yid­dish-speak­ing nation could take root and devel­op, both through Jew­ish agri­cul­tur­al colonies and state-sup­port­ed Yid­dish aca­d­e­m­ic and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. In the first decades of the Sovi­et Union, many intel­lec­tu­als opti­misti­cal­ly looked on as the des­ic­cat­ed pat­terns of tra­di­tion­al Jew­ish life were replaced by the Social­ist real­i­ty. The naïve hopes of a remark­able gen­er­a­tion were wiped out by the twin cat­a­stro­phes of Sovi­et repres­sion and the Nazi Holo­caust. This book will be of val­ue to both gen­er­al and spe­cial­ist read­ers inter­est­ed in Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture and in Sovi­et his­to­ry. Index, bib­li­og­ra­phy, photographs.