Anti-Semitism in the works of a Russian-Jewish writer S. Iushkevich

Iushkevich's works, which comprise numerous short stories and plays release d between 1897 and 1927, while relatively unknown today even of specialists , were very popular in their time. Iushkevich's first stories were received favorably by Russian liberal intellectuals who saw in him a faithful paint er of Odessa's Jewish lower classes. However, in some Jewish milieus he was very soon blamed for dealing with such themes as Jewish prostitution or th e disintegration of the Jewish family which could be harmful to an image-co nscious community having to cope with a generally hostile perception in Rus sian public opinion. Iushkevich's extremely negative unsubtle criticism of Jewish capitalists and bourgeoisie in certain of his plays deviated towards anti-semitism, raising a wave of indignation both in the Jewish community and among certain Russian intellectuals. In this article we try to determin e to what extent certain of Iushkevich's works are anti-semitic. We also ad dress the question of the Russian-Jewish writer's status and how his depend ence on Russian literature could lead him to adopt the anti-Jewish stereoty pes that it traditionally conveyed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Placing Iushkevich's works back into the context of pre-1917 Rus sia allows us to study the evolution of certain anti-semitic representation s and to define their invariants which have through time constituted the ba sis of anti-semitism.