One of the tasks facing historians of east European Jewry is to crack the code of its extraordinary cultural creativity and elasticity. This is no easy assignment, given the fact that it requires knowledge of two Jewish languages (Hebrew and Yiddish) and at least Russian or Polish, as well as an intellectual mastery of traditional and post-traditional genres and idioms. Today's cultural historian is obliged, in addition, to explore the newly accessible archival documentation in Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe. On all these counts, David Fishman's delightful study of a pivotal experience in east European Jewish cultural development takes its place as a worthy contribution to the historiographical record.

Fishman guides the reader easily and comfortably through Jewish Shklov at the end of the eighteenth century, using literary material, archival sources, and an interpretative imagination that convincingly bridges the gaps in the written record. In so doing, he makes a good case for viewing Shklov in the 1780s to 1790s as a microcosmic ‘anticipation’ of the modernizing forces that would affect Russian Jewry as a whole over the next hundred years.

Shklov, in the Mogilev province of White Russia (today Belarus), was an ex - ceptional community, and Fishman is careful to point out just what made it so atypical. Its brush with destiny was determined by its early annexation by Russia in 1772, by its subsequent commercial boom, by the deliberate cultivation there of an advanced cultural outpost of the Russian aristocratic élite, and by the presence of distinguished Jewish scholars, writers, and worldly patrons of Torah and intellectual endeavour of all kinds. Shklov was also fated to play a key role in the battle waged by rabbinical scholars and communal leaders against the nascent hasidic movement in White Russia, which traditionalists viewed as a sectarian threat. Similarly, Shklov leaders played a vital role in the earliest negotiations with the regime over the Jews’ civil status. The community thus became a key link in the political and religious affairs of Russian Jewry, a position that was reflected in its brief reign as a centre for Hebrew publishing (prior to the emergence of Vilna as the region's most important focus of scholarly and literary output).