Thank you for this post. Roadside Picnic is one of my favorite scifi stories, so it was lovely to read more about the Strugatsky brothers.
Marxist academia has managed to replicate the deep racism and Judenhass of the Soviet Union’s propaganda-driven universities. Even shit ideas and shitty people get new acts, all the time - so much for alleged intellectuals.
I know. It feels like being caught in the bad time-loop movie. Did I escape Soviet anti-Zionism, only to meet it again in the academy? And Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece. I did not include it here because I want to write at length about it.
The opening quote is much older than Rabbi Sacks. Rabbi Dr Salo Baron quoted it as a witness at Eichmann’s trial, but I think he was quoting someone even older.
(A side-note as this is a science fiction Substack: the phrase “a dislike for the unlike” appears in the second Doctor Who story, from late 1963/early 1964, referring to the Daleks, who are clearly based on Nazis here. It seems likely to me that author Terry Nation read newspaper coverage of the trial and stored this away in his head for a year or so. Nowadays, it’s a cliché of Doctor Who fandom discourse, completely deJudaised, which seems symbolic of the presentation of the Holocaust in Western society.)
Wasn’t it official policy in the Soviet Bloc to deJudaise the Holocaust and present it as Nazi atrocities against Eastern Europeans in general?
Are these novels available in English? The only novel I’ve read by the Strugatskys (virtually the only Eastern European SF I’ve read, aside from Solaris), is Monday Starts Saturday.
Thanks! I never saw the Second Doctor series, sorry to say! But it’s a very interesting connection. As for the Strugatsky Brothers’ works - all the novels mentioned in my essay are available in English, though some editions may be hard to find. Their masterpiece is Roadside Picnic, and this is widely available, including a Gateway edition. Funny that you have read Monday Starts Saturday - it is a very Soviet novel in a positive sense of the word. Yes, there were positive sides to the USSR, though few and far between. Real intellectual engagement with your work for scientists and techies was one of them.
And you are absolutely correct about the Holocaust. It was only discussed as “the murder of Soviet citizens”, subsumed under the umbrella of “Nazi atrocities”.
Monday Starts Saturday was recommended by algorithm and I asked for it as a birthday present soon after (we don't do surprise presents in my family). It's unusual for me to read a book so soon after hearing about it, so it must have caught my attention in a big way. My edition is part of the SF Masterworks imprint, which is usually a reliable guide to quality.
This is a fascinating analysis. In my reading, I had not picked up the specifically Jewish dimensions of their work. I am curious as to why you stopped at Waves - in my estimation, their best book was Doomed City, which neatly winds up all of their threads into a single hard-hitting novel. The brothers Strugatsky were a major inspiration for my own work: https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com
I grew up in a family where my paternal grandfather prayed every night. He kept the Chumash under his bed and it was used so often that it started to crumble. When in New Orleans , a chabad rabbi invited my family for dinner, my husband and I were shocked when our fathers picked up the Chumash and sign along the prayers as if there was never a break for the Soviet regime. And I remember back in Riga loving going to the synagogue for Simcha Torah and dancing on the street. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were too solemn, though I loved Kol Nidre, especially since it was a favorite prayer of my mother.
This is a difference between Ukraine and the Baltics, I think. The latter were only annexed to the USSR after World War 2 and were spared the brainwashing of the 1930s. I knew some Ukrainian Jews who rediscovered Judaism as part of their Zionism, but my family was not one of them. My grandmother occasionally prayed when in Israel, but neither I nor my Sabra sons do.
My father and my father-in-law studied in yeshivot and my mother in the Hebrew academy, though she did not graduate because of the war. When we came to the States, my boys went to JCC and to a conservative synagogue. I took them to Hebrew classes twice a week and was very proud of them at their bar mitzhot. They had a very difficult Torah portion on Tzara’at and I was very pleased with the way they handled it. By that time, I was teaching ethics at the same synagogue. My biggest regret is that I never learned Hebrew, even though one of my twins tried to teach me. But between working (plus teaching Sunday school) and working on my Master’s, I just had no “space” left, but I am sad about it.
Thank you for this post. Roadside Picnic is one of my favorite scifi stories, so it was lovely to read more about the Strugatsky brothers.
Marxist academia has managed to replicate the deep racism and Judenhass of the Soviet Union’s propaganda-driven universities. Even shit ideas and shitty people get new acts, all the time - so much for alleged intellectuals.
I know. It feels like being caught in the bad time-loop movie. Did I escape Soviet anti-Zionism, only to meet it again in the academy? And Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece. I did not include it here because I want to write at length about it.
The opening quote is much older than Rabbi Sacks. Rabbi Dr Salo Baron quoted it as a witness at Eichmann’s trial, but I think he was quoting someone even older.
(A side-note as this is a science fiction Substack: the phrase “a dislike for the unlike” appears in the second Doctor Who story, from late 1963/early 1964, referring to the Daleks, who are clearly based on Nazis here. It seems likely to me that author Terry Nation read newspaper coverage of the trial and stored this away in his head for a year or so. Nowadays, it’s a cliché of Doctor Who fandom discourse, completely deJudaised, which seems symbolic of the presentation of the Holocaust in Western society.)
Wasn’t it official policy in the Soviet Bloc to deJudaise the Holocaust and present it as Nazi atrocities against Eastern Europeans in general?
Are these novels available in English? The only novel I’ve read by the Strugatskys (virtually the only Eastern European SF I’ve read, aside from Solaris), is Monday Starts Saturday.
Thanks! I never saw the Second Doctor series, sorry to say! But it’s a very interesting connection. As for the Strugatsky Brothers’ works - all the novels mentioned in my essay are available in English, though some editions may be hard to find. Their masterpiece is Roadside Picnic, and this is widely available, including a Gateway edition. Funny that you have read Monday Starts Saturday - it is a very Soviet novel in a positive sense of the word. Yes, there were positive sides to the USSR, though few and far between. Real intellectual engagement with your work for scientists and techies was one of them.
And you are absolutely correct about the Holocaust. It was only discussed as “the murder of Soviet citizens”, subsumed under the umbrella of “Nazi atrocities”.
Monday Starts Saturday was recommended by algorithm and I asked for it as a birthday present soon after (we don't do surprise presents in my family). It's unusual for me to read a book so soon after hearing about it, so it must have caught my attention in a big way. My edition is part of the SF Masterworks imprint, which is usually a reliable guide to quality.
This is a fascinating analysis. In my reading, I had not picked up the specifically Jewish dimensions of their work. I am curious as to why you stopped at Waves - in my estimation, their best book was Doomed City, which neatly winds up all of their threads into a single hard-hitting novel. The brothers Strugatsky were a major inspiration for my own work: https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com
Thanks! I wrote about The Doomed City in another essay, which I am going to post later. Looking forward to reading your work!
I am looking forward to reading it
I grew up in a family where my paternal grandfather prayed every night. He kept the Chumash under his bed and it was used so often that it started to crumble. When in New Orleans , a chabad rabbi invited my family for dinner, my husband and I were shocked when our fathers picked up the Chumash and sign along the prayers as if there was never a break for the Soviet regime. And I remember back in Riga loving going to the synagogue for Simcha Torah and dancing on the street. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were too solemn, though I loved Kol Nidre, especially since it was a favorite prayer of my mother.
This is a difference between Ukraine and the Baltics, I think. The latter were only annexed to the USSR after World War 2 and were spared the brainwashing of the 1930s. I knew some Ukrainian Jews who rediscovered Judaism as part of their Zionism, but my family was not one of them. My grandmother occasionally prayed when in Israel, but neither I nor my Sabra sons do.
My father and my father-in-law studied in yeshivot and my mother in the Hebrew academy, though she did not graduate because of the war. When we came to the States, my boys went to JCC and to a conservative synagogue. I took them to Hebrew classes twice a week and was very proud of them at their bar mitzhot. They had a very difficult Torah portion on Tzara’at and I was very pleased with the way they handled it. By that time, I was teaching ethics at the same synagogue. My biggest regret is that I never learned Hebrew, even though one of my twins tried to teach me. But between working (plus teaching Sunday school) and working on my Master’s, I just had no “space” left, but I am sad about it.