The book under review is a very impressive publication that will be welcomed by students of east European Jewish linguistics, history, and genealogy. The fact that the author is a 31 -year-old computer-systems analyst and not a professionally trained linguist or historian makes his achievement all the more remarkable. The major accomplishment of the book is the compilation of approximately 50,000 names borne by Jews in the former Tsarist Russian Empire with geographical and etymological notes. Preceding the dictionary are a hundred pages consisting of an introduction to Jewish onomastic research and four chapters entitled ‘History of Jewish Names in Eastern Europe’, ‘Types of Jewish Surnames’, ‘Jewish Surnames and Surnames of Other European Peoples’, and ‘Linguistic Aspects of Jewish Surnames’. There are also three appendices (on hyphenated surnames, the most common Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the must common in the Soviet Union) and nineteen tables on various topics of linguistic structure and the geographical distribution of surnames. The bibliography on Slavonic and non-Slavonic Jewish surnames is reasonably comprehensive; a map of major Jewish settlements in the Pale of Settlement is also provided.

With this book, Beider has raised the quality of east European Jewish onomastics by several notches. But while genealogists will welcome this comprehensive listing of names borne by Russian Jews, the utility of the list is occasionally marred by linguistically unsound comments and by arbitrary geographical characterizations.

Students of genealogy will be anxious to have geographical information on Jewish surnames, but what is the value of Beider's information? The author did well to take his data from before 1917, since after that date the accelerated mobility of the Jews within the Pale of Settlement (e.g. from rural to urban centres) and the mass migration to cities in the RSFSR make it extremely difficult to plot the original geographical contours of the names. Had Beider relied on Soviet data, there would have been gross inaccuracies: major cities which could have served as magnets for Jewish settlement, such as Kiev, Minsk, and Odessa, are in fact less informative than small towns. Yet what can we learn from an account which states that Fajn is found in Kovno (Kaunas), but related Fajner in far-off Odessa? Could this really be the entire domain of these names?