Oliver Twist in the Soviet Union

Library Highlight

The “School and Pioneer Library” was a Yiddish-language series of literature published by the Kultur-lige Press in Kyiv in the mid-1920s. Intended for a young Soviet readership, the series included excerpts or abridged versions of literature from writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Leon Trotsky, and Mark Twain. The Yiddish used in this series adheres to Soviet Yiddish orthography of the 1920s, whereby words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin are spelled according to phonetic Yiddish, although word-final letters were still in use.

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist appeared as the fourth number of this series in 1925 under the editorship of the pedagogue, author, and translator Lipe Reznik. Bright colors and sharp angles of the unattributed cover design evoke Russian avant-garde art of the period, while the text tells the tale of poverty and the criminal underworld in industrial England.

This excerpt of the novel spans the period from Oliver’s birth to his arrest for stealing a handkerchief. The criminal ringleader Fagin makes several appearances in this Yiddish version, although his Jewish identity— mentioned hundreds of times in Dickens’ original, leading to accusations of antisemitism—is omitted.