Stanford professor Janice Ross sheds light on Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Leonid Yakobson in her comprehensive biography “Like a Bomb Going Off.”
Yakobson, a contemporary of George Balanchine who is little known outside his native country, created a body of revolutionary work at a time of great repression under Stalin and despite anti-Semitism in the Soviet regime.
Ross, a dance historian and director of the dance division at Stanford, exhaustively researched her subject — delving into archival collections of photographs, films and writings about the Jewish artist’s work for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companies, and interviewing former dancers, family and audience members.
Ross spent years researching Yakobson’s life and impact on dance, traveling to Israel and Russia in the process. She also found a local angle: Yakobson’s widow, Irina Jacobson, was brought to San Francisco by the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jewry in the 1980s and taught dance at the San Francisco Ballet for 12 years before retiring in Israel.
Ross has several speaking engagements in San Francisco in April, including a book signing and lecture at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. For more information, visit www.leonidyakobson.com.
“Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia” by Janice Ross (536 pages, Yale University Press)
In his debut novel, “The Queen of Kansas,” Michael David Fels writes about a young Jewish woman in Brooklyn “who sets out to conquer her world” after graduating high school in the late 1930s. The daughter of Russian immigrant parents, she veers from her desired path of being onstage after meeting a charming older man.
Most of the story, Fels notes, was “constructed from stories my mother told me when I was a boy.” Fels is a writer and playwright living in western Sonoma County.
“The Queen of Kansas” by Michael David Fels (163 pages, www.michaeldavidfels.com)