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Der Nister is the pseudonym of Pinchas Kaganovich (1884-1950), one of the second-generation Yiddish writers who was murdered in the Stalin purges. Krutikov's book is the most definitive and accessible work in English to date on Der Nister and his monumental novel The Family Mashber (Di Mishpokhe Mashber, 1939; first published in English in 1987). Der Nister wrote The Family Mashber in the later half of his career--he gave up his poetic writing to concentrate on this multivolume epic, which consumed the rest of his life--and this period is of course Krutikov's focus. Kritikov (Slavic literature and Judaic studies, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor) takes the reader into the world of Yiddish publishing and literary criticism, political and ideological struggles among Jewish writers on two continents, Hasidism, and Russo-Polish intellectual wars. Almost all of the original Yiddish Krutikov includes is translated into English and then reproduced immediately in Yiddish in Roman script (a happy choice on Krutikov's part). Anglophones will get through this examination of Der Nister (which appears in the "Jews in Eastern Europe" series), but no further; to dig deeper into the present literature on Der Nister requires, at a minimum, knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.