The present essay considers the unique identity and socio-cultural dynamics of post-Soviet Jewish populations in Russia, Ukraine and Germany in the 1990s, supported by analysis of its treatment in contemporary Russian literature, namely in the short fiction of the Ukrainian-Russian Jewish writer Aleksandr Khurgin. In a darkly humorous way, Khurgin's works treat the theme of belonging to a Jewish minority during the final years of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Jewish emigration to Germany. Certain of his works seem to imply that post-Soviet Jewish identity was a cultural and to a lesser degree national identity, rather than a religious one. His fiction, which is shown to essentially reflect socio-cultural reality, thereby engages with the dynamics of an ethno-religious minority in an offcially supranational atheistic state. Likewise, it reflects a sense of having become a minority group of another kind in the country of emigration, and of alienation in a more traditional nation-state, effecting multi-layered challenges to identity.
This essay is based on a conference paper that was originally presented at the conference Minority Identities: Rights and Representation, in a panel devoted to religious minorities. The conference was held in May 2011 at the University of Reading, UK.