Messages in a Bottle

American Jewish Literature Converses with the Russian Canon

‘How could an American be Doestoevsky or Doestoevsky be an American?’ — Irving Howe, Steady Work

‘To whom does the poet speak?’ asked Osip Mandelstam in his 1913 essay, On the Interlocutor.

At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of one who has passed on. I have the right to do so. I have not opened someone else’s mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have become its secret addressee.

To claim himself, a Russian Jewish Modernist, heir to the classic Russian poets of the past required a degree of imagination, if not a speck of audacity.  But Mandelstam was an imaginative young poet living at an audacious moment. Good literature, after all, should be stretched beyond temporal, political and ethnic boundaries. Mandelstam’s dialogue has evolved in recent years with a new wave of Russian-born Jewish writers who appear, in various forms, to have found a bottle, opened it, and attempted to reply. Only many of them are responding from another shore, and in another language. Read more