ABSTRACT
The Israeli historian Yehoshua A. Gilboa used Shmuel Gordon's writings to illustrate the Jewish national awakening that took place during wartime and was reflected in postwar Soviet Yiddish literature: In his story, 'Heirs of the Angel of Death', Shmuel Gordon portrays an aged Jew in a little township in the Crimea who does not leave his home after the German invasion. In his story 'The candles that are burning', Gordon portrays mainly Russian people, but they busy themselves with saving Yiddish books, after two boxes of these have been found in a former Jewish village in the Crimea. While the first part of Yizker is arguably the best prose work written by Gordon, the second part, describing Mandel's arrest and interrogations, is not very readable. Gordon's cultural environment of genuine Yiddish-speaking Jews continued to shrink, and Soviet Jewishness did increasingly perform a puzzling social — and, particularly from 1967, international — function.
