Rabinovich’s work was continued by a talented youth, the journalist Ilya (Elias) Orshanski of Yekaterinoslav (1846-1875), who was the main contributor to the Dyen of Odessa and to the Yevreyskaya Bibliotyeka. [1] To fight for Jewish rights, not to offer humble apologies, to demand emancipation, not to beg for it, this attitude lends a charm of its own to Orshanski’s writings.  His brilliant analysis of “Russian Legislation concerning the Jews” [2] offers a complete anatomy of Jewish disfranchisement in Russia, beginning with Catherine II. and ending with Alexander II.

[Footnote 1:  Compare above, p. 220 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  The title of his work on the same subject which appeared in St. Petersburg in 1877.]

Nevertheless, being a child of his age, he preached its formula.  While a passionate Jew at heart, he championed the cause of Russification, though not in the extreme form of spiritual self-effacement.  The Odessa pogrom of 1871 staggered his impressionable soul.  He was tossing about restlessly, seeking an outlet for his resentment, but everywhere he knocked his head against the barriers of censorship and police.  Had he been granted longer life, he might, like Smolenskin, have chosen the road of a nationalistic-progressive synthesis, but the white plague carried him off in his twenty-ninth year.

The literary work of Lev (Leon) Levanda (1835-1888) was of a more complicated character.  A graduate of one of the official rabbinical schools, he was first active as teacher in a Jewish Crown school in Minsk, and afterwards occupied the post of a “learned Jew” [1] under Muravyov, the governor-general of Vilna.  He thus moved in the hot-bed of “official enlightenment” and in the headquarters of the policy of Russification as represented by Muravyov, a circumstance which left its impress upon all the products of his pen.  In his first novel, “The Grocery Store” (1860), of little merit from the artistic point of view, he still appears as the naive bard of that shallow “enlightenment,” the champion of which is sufficiently characterized by wearing a European costume, calling himself by a well-sounding German or Russian name (in the novel under discussion the hero goes by the name of Arnold), cultivating friendly relations with noble-minded Christians and making a love match unassisted by the marriage-broker.

[Footnote 1:  In Russian, Uchony Yevrey, an expert in Jewish matters, attached, according to the Russian law of 1844, to the superintendents of school districts and to the governors-general within the Pale.]