Music from a Speeding Train

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe-one in which modernism revolution socialist realism violence and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented attacked reformed and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture.