SUMMARY:

Commemorating Alla Zeide (1941–2024), a literary scholar and student of Russian culture, this archival publication presents a fragment from her diary of January 1990. This document is her self-portrait but it is also a snapshot of a generation and a social type. Zeide writes about the trauma of her Soviet Jewishness, which she experienced most acutely during what she called her “personal Jewish pogrom” in school at the peak of the late Stalinist antisemitic campaign. She also contemplates the highly censored family memory of the first generation of Soviets, including her parents born in the 1910s, so that she learned only bits and pieces about her immediate ancestors.