The garden of hidden delights of the Russian-Jewish avant-garde

What is the Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde? How can it be defined in recent scholarly bibliography? The suggestive Jewish element in Russian Modernism was always, quite heavily (and at times playfully), pronounced. The term, then, represents an umbrella concept that unites both currents within the Russian Jewish community, the religious and the secular, in the perspective of its tortuous history. Secular Jewish art flourished in St. Petersburg, where Leon Bakst was one of the major names along with artists such as Marc Chagall, Alexander Romm, and Sofia Dymshitz. A timid modernist, Leonid Pasternak might be mentioned here as an occasional character, too, along with Iosif Shkolnik and the group “Union of Youth.” A special episode of Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde relates to France and Paris. This historical cluster, all part of the School of Paris, featured a variety of names, including Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipschitz, Hannah Orlova, and Emmanuel Mane-Katz, all of whom had undeniable biographical ties with Russia