Stomach: the memory of a Jewish town / Ed. by I. Kopchenov, Moscow, 2013, 328 p.; Lost Neighborhood: Jews in the cultural memory of Latgale residents. Materials of the expeditions of 2011-2012 / Ed. by S. Amosov M., 2013. - 382 p.; Pages of history and culture of the Jews of Georgia (in the footsteps of the expedition of 2013) / Ed. by M. Chlenov M., 2014. - 136 p.; Jews on the map of Lithuania: Go ahead. Problems of preserving the Jewish heritage and historical memory / Ed. by I. Kopchenov, Moscow, 2015, 366 p.

The above collections are publications of materials and analytical articles collected and written by participants of expeditions organized by the Sefer Center for Jewish Scholars and Teachers in Higher Education Institutions. The Sefer Center, in collaboration with various partners, has been organizing field schools on Jewish ethnography and epigraphy for undergraduates, postgraduates, and young researchers since 2003. The participants of the expeditions conducted research in Belarus, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania-both in places where communal Jewish life still exists in one form or another, and in regions where only empty synagogues, cemeteries and memories of Jews who once lived there can be found. former neighbors.

The collection "Stomach: The Memory of a Jewish Shtetl" is dedicated to various aspects of the life of the Jewish community in the Western Belarusian shtetl. It is worth noting that this book was not only the first in a series of publications of materials from field schools, but also the first attempt in Russian-language scientific literature to address the topic of the Jewish shtetl as a special cultural phenomenon on the example of a single town, collecting and analyzing diverse sources-ethnographic, ar-

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khivnye, memoir and epigraphic works. Like many other Jewish towns, the Stomach was wiped off the map of Eastern Europe in this capacity: before the war, the Jewish population made up 70 percent of its inhabitants, but was almost completely destroyed in May 1942. The introductory article by Sergey Pivovarchik and Irina Sorokina contains a lot of interesting historical and statistical information, representing a rather detailed and comprehensive historical essay about the town. Maria Sidorova-Shpilker's article "Jews of the small town of Zheludok" is based on archival materials and memoirs of residents of Zheludok about the tragic events of May 1942. The author makes a number of interesting observations about the perception of the" inconvenient " Jewish theme by the current residents of the village and offers a number of recommendations that could help them understand the events of 1942.

In the article "Not friends and not Strangers: Jews in the social space of Belarusian peasants of the XIX-XX centuries", Olga Shatalova analyzes the reasons for changes in the attitude of Belarusian peasants to Jews and tends to explain its deterioration mainly by economic reasons - competition has replaced mutually beneficial cooperation. At the same time, the common experience of oppression by the Poles made Jews more acceptable "strangers" in the eyes of Belarusians. In conclusion, the author writes about the" softening "of the perception of Jews by Belarusians after the Holocaust, which, in our opinion, contradicts the examples given just above of neighbors' attempts to rationalize the extermination of Jews - these attempts can be reduced to two words:"they are to blame". Olga Belova's articles " Portrait of an Ethnic Neighbor: Jews through the Eyes of Slavs "and Olga Shchur's" Jews in the view of the inhabitants of the village of Farny Konets " partially continue the topic raised in Shatalova's article. Using a rich field material, the authors demonstrate how traditional stereotypes about Jews were formed and lived in this region. In addition, the collection contains a catalog of the Jewish cemetery of the town of Stomach and memoirs of a native of the town of Miron Mordukhovich.

Published in the same year, 2013, the collection "Lost Neighborhood" is an attempt to study the phenomenon of the formation of social ideas about the past - in this case, the memory of Jews in modern Latgale.

The collection opens with Mikhail Alekseyevsky's publication "Jewish Character" in Ethnocultural Stereotypes of Everyday Life.-

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lei of Latgale". The author notes that in general, positive connotations prevail over negative connotations in informants ' stories about Jews, and suggests that the formation of a positive image is associated with the disappearance of Jews from this region. This resulted in the idealization of former neighbors, which manifested itself in a positively colored set of actual ethnic stereotypes. The author's lack of attention to the circumstances of this disappearance causes some confusion: they are, of course, mentioned, but they are not taken into account in any way when forming a hypothesis about the reasons for the "idealization" of the image of the Jew in the region under study. Meanwhile, as is known, in Latgale, the extermination of Jews was carried out mainly by the Latvian police, with the active support of the local population. Isn't it possible to assume that collective guilt was at least one of the reasons for replacing some stereotypes with others?

I will mention a few more materials in the collection that are more or less related to religious issues. Daria Tereshina's publication " Many Jews... they were all engaged in trade": memories of Jewish shops and traveling merchants of pre-war Latgale " continues the theme of stereotypes, this time in connection with one of the main areas of business activity of the Jewish population. Publications: Svetlana Amosova, Yulia Andreeva and Vladislav Ivanov "Jewish religion, religious practices and synagogues in the stories of old-timers of Latgale"; Mikhail Alekseevsky "Ideas about Jewish funeral and memorial traditions in the stories of Latgale residents"; Viktor Andrushkevich and Marina Hecht "Stories about Jewish holidays"; Svetlana Amosova "Caught, killed, blood drawn and they add to this matzah": stories about the bloody navet in Latgale " (which makes adjustments to the somewhat idealized picture drawn in the first publication of the collection); Yuri Andreev and Maria Vyatchina "Kosher table"and" khazer": Jewish food practices in the view of non - Jewish residents of Latgale", which are devoted to various religious and religious issues.domestic aspects of Jewish life in the views of their foreign-ethnic neighbors. The publications contain rich field material that requires further analysis with the use of comparative material from other regions.

The second section of the collection includes articles based on various sources (oral, archival, literary) on the history of Latvian Jews in the XX century.

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The article "The state's attitude to Jewish communities in Latvia in the 20-30s of the XX century" by Inessa Runtse is devoted to the change in the state policy of independent Latvia in relation to Jewish communities. The author concludes that Jews, as well as other "non-traditional historical" religious minorities in Latvia (Baptists, Adventists, Old Believers), did not experience harassment during the period under review.

Karina Barkan's article "Observance of Jewish Traditions in Latgale during the Soviet period (second half of the 1940s-early 1960s): between archival documents and Memories"is of great interest. The author examines the forms in which some elements of Jewish everyday and religious culture persisted in the post-war period, despite the Holocaust, which radically changed the national situation in Latgale, as well as the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government.

One of the most successful is an article by Didzis Berzins, devoted to the peculiarities of the reflection of the memory of the Holocaust in Latvia in Soviet literature. The author prefixed the main text of his article with a short preamble on the current state of memory studies in relation to the Holocaust, noting some differences in this area in Western and Eastern Europe. Speaking about the reflection on the Holocaust in Latvia, the author believes that it was not continuous, and identifies three periods in the post-war history of Latvia, when the theme of the Catastrophe was reflected in Soviet works of art. It remains to be regretted that the reader of this generally very worthy collection is not able to assess how the memory of the Holocaust is presented in modern oral narratives, how it influenced the formation of the image of Jews and the perception of Jewish tradition by the local population.

The next collection, published in 2014, is dedicated to the phenomenon of Georgian Jews. This ethno-confessional group is among the least studied Jewish ethnic groups, it is more integrated into the Georgian society than others, and its history is still hardly separated from the mythological component. The participants of the expedition, whose materials formed the basis of this collection, carried out work in two directions - ethnographic and epigraphic, trying to embrace the immensity-history and modernity. Actually, the author of the first article " Jews of Georgia: acculturation without assimilation

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(II century BC - XX century)" Konstantin Lerner successfully copes with this task. He notes that the study of Georgian Jewry is of great value not only for Judaism, but also from the point of view of general social theory, since "the history of the Jewish community of Georgia provides a vivid example of a successful strategy for the ethno-religious and economic survival of a small group within the dominant society" (p.14).

The following article, which you should pay attention to, is written by the famous Russian ethnographer Mark Kupovetsky about the Jews of Kakheti in the XIV-XVII centuries. The author notes the limited source base on the history of Georgian Jews and points out the need to attract, in addition to the Georgian proper, synchronous Russian, Western European and Persian sources. Thanks to the proposed approach, the article for the first time reconstructs the living conditions and circumstances of the disappearance of Jewish communities in Kakheti.

Field materials of the expedition in the Georgian collection are presented by the publication of Svetlana Amosova, Maria Vyatchina and Elena Sabantseva "Jews... they were either doctors or salesmen", which is based on short interviews about the life of Jews in Georgia. The publication, in our opinion, lacks an analytical commentary - how universal/unique Georgian ethnic stereotypes are, etc. To some extent, this gap is filled in by the article "Relations between the Jewish and Jewish communities of Georgia" by Anastasia Chizhova, which, despite its descriptive nature, still allows you to put the above-mentioned interviews in a certain context.

In addition to those already mentioned, the collection includes two very interesting articles by Maciej Vons "The Jews of Georgia and their Polish books" and "The Image of Jews in Polish descriptions of the Caucasus", Natalia Kashovskaya "Epigraphic excursion to the mountain village of Lailashi", Lela Tsutsiashvili "The Jewish Cultural Heritage of Georgia", Guram Lortkipanidze " New archival materials on the Jewish Diaspora of Georgia", as well as Shots of Bastanashvili "Synagogues of Georgia".

Finally, the latest collection to date is once again devoted to the problems of historical memory - this time based on Lithuanian material. The researchers focused on the town of Birzhai, where the Rabbanite and Karaite communities once coexisted peacefully. Currently, a number of projects are being implemented here on the initiative of local residents aimed at studying the Jewish cultural heritage and updating it.

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The collection opens with articles by Ruta Anulite and Krzysztof Bielawski, which discuss the problem of preserving Jewish heritage in Lithuania and Poland. Both countries almost completely lost their Jewish populations, and in both countries the scale of this tragedy was due to the active participation of the local population in the Holocaust. The articles discuss how the attitude towards Jewish heritage (primarily material, but not only) has changed in this regard, which, due to the lack of Jewish communities, has fallen on the shoulders of the state and the local population.

Vladimir Petrukhin's articles "Rabbanite and Karaite Communities in Medieval Lithuania: Problems of Early History" and Yurigita Siauciunaite-Verbitskene's "Essays on the History of the Birzhai Jewish Community" discuss the problems of the emergence and coexistence of Rabbanite and Karaite communities in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The next block of materials is devoted to the image of a Jew in the memoirs of Lithuanian neighbors. Rimas Slyuzhinskas 'publication" Historical Memories of Lithuanians about Jews in the Birzhai area (1920-1940): A Modern View " attempts to systematically present the memories of Lithuanians about Jews, including not only the peculiarities of their everyday and religious culture, but also the evidence of the Holocaust. In the same section, an interesting publication by Ilya Magin "Old Believers as Jews: features of food bans among the Old Believers of northern Lithuania"is presented. Despite the fact that the promising provocative title hides field material aimed at "giving samples of the little-known dialect of Birzhai Old Believers", the article is not purely linguistic and contains a lot of interesting information, including about the attitude of Old Believers to Jews and the Holocaust.

An entire section of the Birzhai collection is dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, with articles by Maria Vyatchina, Boris Rashkovsky, and a publication by Svetlana Amosova. The authors note that the nature of the collective memory of the Holocaust is probably due to the special sensitivity of informants who personally knew the victims, as well as the well-known facts of local residents ' participation in massacres of Jews. Many works have been written about the mechanisms of formation of individual and collective memories in connection with global traumatic events in the last decade. Let us recall at least the recently translated book by Aleida Assman "The Length of the Russian language".-

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The Dark Shadow of the Past: Memorial Culture and Historical Politics "(Moscow, 2014). The materials published in the collection provide additional food both for verification of existing theories and for further theoretical constructions in this area.

At the end of this brief review, I want to make a few thoughts about the series as a whole. On the one hand, the value of materials published in collections is indisputable: most of them are unique publications that introduce new sources into scientific circulation. On the other hand, many publications lack an analytical component, and as a result, for example, in stories about the bloody navet or stories about ethnic stereotypes in Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, the reader has to isolate the universal and unique by comparative analysis. In some cases, articles from the same collection contain repetitions, which, on the one hand, is unavoidable due to the authors ' reference to the general field archive, and on the other hand, can be minimized by editorial editing. Probably, we can expect positive dynamics in these issues. In general, all four collections are certainly of great interest to historians and religious scholars and are a valuable contribution to the development of academic Judaism.

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