was the real new church, the one that could not be separated from the state lest the state lose all meaning, the one that was all the more powerful for being taken for granted, the one that Jews could enter while still believing that they were in a neutral place worshiping Progress and Equality. It was possible to be an American “of Mosaic faith” because the American national religion was not based on tribal descent and the cult of the national soul embodied by a national bard. In turn-of-the-century Central and Eastern Europe, it was impossible because the national faith was itself Mosaic. Having entered the new church, Jews proceeded to worship. At first the preferred medium was German, but with the establishment of other strong, institutionalized canons, large numbers of Jews became Hungarian, Russian, and Polish believers. Osip Mandelstam’s description of his bookcase tells the story of these Jews chronologically, genealogically (his mother’s and father’s lineages), and, from his vantage point as a Russian poet, hierarchically: I remember the lower shelf as being always chaotic: the books were not standing side by side but lay like ruins: the rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings, a Russian history of the Jews, written in the clumsy and timid language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos abandoned to the dust. . . . Above these Judaic remnants the books stood in orderly formation; these were the Germans—Schiller, Goethe, Koerner, and Shakespeare in German—the old Leipzig and Tübingen editions, short and stout in their embossed dark-red bindings, with the fine print meant for youthful sharp- sightedness and with delicate engravings hinting at classical antiquity: the women with their hair down and arms outstretched, the lamp depicted as an oil-burning one, the horsemen with their high foreheads, and the grape clusters in the vignettes. That was my father the autodidact fighting his way into the Germanic world through the Talmudic thicket. Higher still were my mother’s Russian books: Pushkin in the 1876 Isakov edition. I still think it was an absolutely marvelous edition and like it better than the Academy one. There is nothing superfluous in it; the type is gracefully arranged; the columns of verse flow freely, like soldiers in flying battalions, and leading them, like generals, are the sensible, distinct year headings all the way through 1837. What color is Pushkin? Every color is accidental—for what color could capture the wizardry of words? 45 The secular Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and other Pushkins—as well as