Papers of the international conference held in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

History, culture, and everyday life. The Mariinsko Sergievskii Shelter for Converted Jewish Children in St. Petersburg / Chae Ran Y. Freeze -- Yiddish in imperial Russia's civil society / Gennady Estraikh -- Ansky in Liozno: "Sins of Youth" and the archival diary / Gabriella Safran -- In the evil kingdom of things: Sholem-Aleichem and the writing of everyday life in Jewish literature / Olga Litvak -- A paper life: model letters and real letters as a key to Russian-Jewish aspirations at the turn of the twentieth century / Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman -- Upheaval, violence, and antisemitism. Violence and the migration of Ashkenazi Jews to Eastern Europe / Shaul Stampfer -- Uses and abuses: "pogrom" in the Anglo-American imagination, 1881 -- 1919 / Sam Johnson -- Jews in the East European borderlands. Look! Up there in the sky: it's a vulture, it's a bat . . . It's a Jew. Reflections on antisemitism in late imperial Russia, 1906 -- 1914 / Robert Weinberg -- Shots in the back: on the origin of the Anti-Jewish pogroms of 1918 -- 1921/ Oleg Budnitskii -- Between external persecution and national renaissance : Simon Dubnow's lachrymose vision of Russian-Jewish History / Joshua M. Karlip -- Soviet Holocaust photography and landscapes of emptiness / David Shneer -- Transformed myths in verse: Boris Slutsky's three Holocaust poems and the question of violence / Marat Grinberg.