Embodied Differences : The Jew's Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

“The topic of Henrietta Mondry’s publication can give pleasure to those scholars in Slavic Studies who are interested in how themes of Jewish corporeality are ingrained in Russian societal politics and cultural discourses. … Embodied Differences continues Mondry’s series of original and groundbreaking research published in books and articles centered on the notion of the Jewish Other in Russian literature and culture, where she treats the interconnected topics as the manifestation of the Jew’s essentialized alterity that has been employed to discriminate, entitle, and negotiate the everyday. …[T]his volume is slim, lucidly written, and has plenty to offer… Mondry’s argument is driven with interdisciplinary vigor to bring scientific and philosophic writing … to support her conclusions and present a nuanced picture in which she treats a Jewish physical ‘type’ as a construct whose elements were utilized in Russian literary and cultural imagination. … Embodied Differences exemplifies best practices of scholarly questioning of broad generalizations in a scrupulous, innovative, and highly individualized fashion.”

— Elena Katz, University of Helsinki, Slavic Review

“Henrietta Mondry shows in her new book that the opposition of Jewish to Russian materiality structures literary texts, visual representations, and perceptions of culinary heritage… Mondry persuasively argues for the persistence and significance of the patterns she identifies… [H]er claims are convincing, and she provides a fearless tour through the contradictory landscape of Russian discourse about Jews, its appetizing and unappetizing parts alike.”

— Gabriella Safran, Stanford University, The Russian Review (October 2021)

“This book undoubtedly expands and deepens our knowledge of both the conceptual and the strictly artistic-aesthetic depiction of the Jewish body in Russian literature (especially from the point of view of ''the existence of an object in an alien cultural space''). This is visible in the author’s skillful and subtle interpretations, which are rooted, on the one hand, in a thorough grasp of the material being studied, and, on the other hand, in a pervasive scholarly scrupulousness and a degree of innovative boldness.”

—Vladimir Khazan, Department of Russian, German and Eastern European Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem