Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

JUDEOPHILE (story) By Naum Vaiman Translated from the Russian by Alexander Cigale When I announced my intention to study history at the University, my father said: “History does not feed us, it kills us,” and he immediately rattled off a list of relatives who had vanished, having carelessly stepped out onto the slippery slope of the “ideological path”. And he added: “We have enough historians already”. And here I was, imbibing all the university textbooks and readers in ancient history I could lay my hands on as though they were novels. My attraction towards primary sources drewme into the labyrinth of the illegal book trade. This was the realm of the emotionally charged chase after the announced, and immediately disappearing, editions of Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus that had been published in the “literary relics,” or after the Academia Press rarities of the early thirties (one time, I got a hold of a Machiavelli with Kamnev’s introduction, published in ‘34 – the pride of my collection,) and the prerevolutionary editions of encyclopedias and classics of philosophy. This hunt for books encompassed everything: the excitation of discoveries, a challenge to totalitarianism, thirst for adventure, the vices of envy, greed, and ardor, and even small-time criminality, inasmuch as, besides the usual, 189