I would like to express my gratitude to Amelia Glaser, Steven Cassedy, Mark D. Steinberg, Jane T. Hedges, and my two anonymous reviewers for their insights into this article. I would also like to warmly thank Benjamin Sutcliffe for advice during the early stage of my research.

1. For a discussion of Soviet Jews as “non-Jewish Jews,” see Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies, “Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (January 2011): 130-32. On Soviet Jews and Jewish dietary observance, see Shternshis, Anna, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Bloomington, 2006).Google Scholar

2. See Gitelman, Zvi, Giants, Musya, and Goldman, Marshall I., eds., Jewish Life after the USSR (Bloomington, 2003)Google Scholar; Lewin-Epstein, Noah, Ro'i, Yaacov, and Ritterband, Paul, eds., Russian Jews on Three Continents: Migration and Resettlement (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Remennick, Larissa, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration and Conflict (New Brunswick, 2007)Google Scholar; and the special issue on Russian Diaspora from Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (January 2011).

3. Ulitskaia, Liudmila, Daniel’ Shtain, perevodchik (Moscow, 2006).Google Scholar All translations of the novel are mine.

4. It should be noted that Daniel’ Shtain is not the first Russian-language novel to feature a Jewish protagonist and translator. Felix Roziner's samizdat novel, A Certain Finkelmeyer (New York, 1991), also investigates the relationship between Jews and translation in the Soviet Union, particularly the profession's potential to depend on but also oppress Jewish intellectuals. When compared to A Certain Finkelmeyer, Ulitskaia's novel offers an attempt to reclaim and celebrate the idea of the Soviet Jew as translator.

5. Apter, Emily, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Venuti, Lawrence, The Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Venuti, Lawrence, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (New York, 2004).Google Scholar For related scholarship in translation studies, see Ricoeur, Paul, On Translation, trans. Brennan, Eileen (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Robinson, Douglas, The Translator's Turn (Baltimore, 1991)Google Scholar; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Politics of Translation,” Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Niranjana, Tejaswini, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992).Google Scholar

6. Benjamin, Walter, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Zohn, Harry, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Arendt, Hannah (New York, 1969), 77-78.Google Scholar

7. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

8. Seidman, Naomi, Faithful Renderings: fewish- Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Ibid., 9.

10. Ibid., 10.

11. For a biography of Oswald Rufeisen, see Tec, Nechama, In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

12. For detailed analyses of the case, see Jackson, Bernard S., “Brother Daniel: The Construction of Jewish Identity in the Israel Supreme Court,” International Journal for the Semiotics ofLaw, 6 no. 17 (1993): 115-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marc Galanter, “A Dissent on Brother Daniel,” Commentary (July 1963): 10-17.

13. Considered to be a fundamental embodiment of Zionist ideology, the Law of Return concerns Israel's basic immigration policy. For an English-language text of the Law of Return as it applied to Rufeisen, see Rabinovich, Itamar and Reinharz, Jehuda, eds., Israel in the Middle East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign Relations, pre-1948 to the Present, 2d ed. (Waltham, Mass., 2008), 102-3.Google Scholar While the Law of Return has been amended twice since its original passage in 1950 in order to broaden inclusivity, it also currendy states that, “for the purposes of this Law, Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” See http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/return.htm (last accessed 1 December 2011). On Jewish religious law and conversion, see Boyarin, Daniel, “The Christian Invention of judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,” Representations 85, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 21-57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Boyarin, “at the stage of the ‘definitive’ formulation of rabbinic Judaism in the Babylonic Talmud, the Rabbis… propos[ed] … the distinct ecclesiological principle: ‘An Israelite, even if he [sic] sins, remains an Israelite …’ Whatever its original meaning, this sentence was understood throughout classical rabbinic Judaism an indicating that one cannot cease to be a Jew even via apostasy” (22).

14. See Sutcliffe, Benjamin M., The Prose of Life: Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev to Putin (Madison, 2009)Google Scholar; and Gosteva, Anastasiia, “Liudmila Ulitskaia: ‘I Accept Everything That Is Given': An Interview,” Russian Studies in Literature 37, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 72-93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where Ulitskaia discusses her attitude toward gender and literature and, specifically, the concept of zhenskaia literatura.

15. See Sutcliffe, Benjamin M., “Liudmila Ulitskaia's Literature of Tolerance,” Russian Review, 68 no. 3 (July 2009): 495-509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. On secular Jewish public cultures in Russia, see Veidlinger, Jeffrey, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington, 2009)Google Scholar; and B., Kennetii Moss, Jezuish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).Google Scholar

17. On the design and implementation of the Soviet nationality policy, see Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005).Google Scholar According to Iosif Stalin, who was entrusted with the task of conceptualizing the Soviet view of the nation and the nationalities policy, “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture.“Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question: A Collection of Articles and Speeches, ed. A. Feinberg (New York, 1934), 8. Stalin's criteria applied inconsistendy to the Jewish case, however. In contrast to other nationalities, only a small minority of Jews resided in their designated national territory, Birobidzhan. Moreover, with the phasing out of Yiddish after its initial implementation for Jewish secularization and socialist indoctrination in the 1920s and 1930s, Jews lost a publicly reinforced connection to their national language. For arguments that the nationalities policy failed to apply to, not to mention accommodate, the development of Jews as a Soviet nationality, see Theodore H. Friedgut, “Nationalities Policy, the Soviet Regime, the Jews and Emigration,” and Yaacov R'oi, “Religion, Israel, and the Development of Sovietjewry's National Consciousness, 1967-1991,” both in Gitelman, Giants, and Goldman, eds., Jewish Life after the USSR, 27-45 and 13-26. For the Soviet government's instrumental usage and abandonment of Yiddish, see Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher.

18. Hirsch, , Empire of Nations, 232.Google Scholar

19. The nationalities of Soviet citizens were indicated in their required internal passports in what was known as the “fifth point,” without the possibility of modification. On Soviet passports, see Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” and Hirsch, Empire of Nations.

20. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 19-20.Google Scholar

21. Scholars who deal with the Soviet nationality policy make careful distinctions between Soviet nationality and western European and American concepts of race. For examples, see Steven S. Lee, “Borat, Multiculturalism, Mnogonatsiojtal1nost'',” Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 27nl8; and Hirsch, Francine, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30-43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hirsch concedes, however, that “in the Soviet context, it is important to know … whether the official distinction between race and nationality was meaningful ‘on the ground'” (41). For more on the debate about race and nationality in the Soviet Union, see articles by Weitz, Eric D., Weiner, Amir, and Lemon, Alaina in Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002).Google Scholar

22. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison, 2004)Google Scholar; and Gitelman, Zvi, ‘Jewish Identity and Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine,” in Gitelman, Zvi, ed., Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution (New Brunswick, 2009), 241-66.Google Scholar

23. Kornblatt, , Doubly Chosen, 47.Google Scholar

24. Gitelman, ‘Jewish Identity and Secularism,” 251.

25. Kornblatt, , Doubly Chosen, 33.Google Scholar

26. Gitelman, “Jewish Identity and Secularism,” 244, 253-54.

27. On the role of Hebrew revival in the formation of a Jewish national identity in eastern Europe, see Harshav, Benjamin, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 99.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., 102.

30. Ibid., 101.

31. Seidman, , Faithful Renderings, 7-8.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 9.

33. Ibid.

34. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 71.

35. Ibid.

36. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 229.Google Scholar

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. By relying on Christian narrative tropes and iconography, Stein participates in the twentieth-century artistic tradition of using Christianity to gain sympathy for historical catastrophes experienced by east European Jews. For a study that lends attention to this trend, see Roskies, David G., Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).Google Scholar

40. Seidman, , Faithful Renderings, 8.Google Scholar

41. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 24.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., 82.

43. Kornblatt, , Doubly Chosen, 33.Google Scholar Similarly, in Gitelman's study, a Jewish interviewee identified as a woman from Moscow claims, “'There is a difference between a Jew-bynationality [Eirrei] and a Jew-by-religion [Iudei]. So ajew can take on a different religion,'” a response that Gitelman interprets as “logical: if Jewishness is ethnicity only, uien one should be able to practice whatever religion one wishes without affecting one's ethnicity.” Gitelman, ‘Jewish Identity and Secularism,” 255.

44. Kornblatt, , Doubly Chosen, 10, 9.Google Scholar

45. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 79.

46. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 81.Google Scholar

47. For an anthropological overview of the Great Aliya, see Siegel, Dina, The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

48. Safran, William, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83-99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Seidman, , Faithful Renderings, 10.Google Scholar

50. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 20.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 23.

52. Ibid., 24.

53. Ibid., 159-60.

54. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 80.

55. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 214-15.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., 215.

57. A relevant example here is Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's attempt to infuse their German translation of the Torah with the original Hebrew linguistic structures and idioms. For scholarship on Buber and Rosenzweig's biblical translation, see Buber, Martin and Rosenzweig, Franz, Scripture and Translation, trans. Rosenwald, Lawrence and Fox, Everett (Bloomington, 1994)Google Scholar; Reichert, Klaus, “'It is Time': The Buberand Rosenzweig Bible Translation in Context,” in Budick, Sanford and Iser, Wolfgang, eds., The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations in the Space Between (Stanford, 1996), 169-85Google Scholar; and Seidman, , Faithful Renderings, 153-98.Google Scholar

58. See Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

59. Ulitskaia, , Daniel’ Shtain, 514-15.Google Scholar

60. Ibid.

61. In a similar manner, Emily Apter asserts that translation occurs between its simultaneous impossibility and its absolute possibility. Apter's The Translation Zone opens with a list of twenty theses, the first stating, “Nothing is translatable,” and the final stating, “Everything is translatable,” xi-xii.

62. Ulitskaia's subtle critique of Israeli conceptions of Jewish identity through Stein's experience inadvertently echoes a trend in reactions to Oswald Rufeisen's trial, including Galanter's suggestion that “one might wonder whether the ‘everyday’ definitions of ‘Jew’ in Israel as sufficiently differentiated to incorporate the many meanings attached to the term in the Diaspora—for it is to Diaspora Jews diat the law of Return applies.” Galanter, “A Dissent on Brother Daniel,” 11.

63. Gitelman presents this distinction in Zvi Gitelman, “The Decline of the Diaspora Jewish Nation: Boundaries, Content and National Identity,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 4, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 112-32, and applies it specifically to Russian-speaking Jews in Gitelman, ‘Jewish Identity and Secularism,” 262.