Taking Penguins To The Movies

Draitser uses humor as a means of understanding the attitudes and customs, beliefs and idiosyncrasies, and inter- and intra-group relationships of this multinational society. In analyzing the jokes, he seeks to determine what makes them funny, why certain groups are targeted, and even why a mediocre joke can be received with great enthusiasm.

Contains sample lesson plans, reproducible activities, vocabulary lists, and other resources designed to help teachers use the book "Mr. Popper's Penguins" in their classrooms.

Familiar Strangers examines how the Soviet empire was built, and ultimately dismantled, by ethnic outsiders. Scott retells Soviet history from the perspective of the socialist state's internal Georgian diaspora, illuminating processes of mobility within Soviet borders and offering an understanding of empire that transcends the divide between colonizer and colonized.

Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals." Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.

Mr. Popper and his family have penguins in the fridge and an ice rink in the basement in this hilarious Newbery Honor book that inspired the hit movie! How many penguins in the house is too many? Mr. Popper is a humble house painter living in Stillwater who dreams of faraway places like the South Pole. When an explorer responds to his letter by sending him a penguin named Captain Cook, Mr. Popper and his family’s lives change forever. Soon one penguin becomes twelve, and the Poppers must set out on their own adventure to preserve their home. First published in 1938, Mr. Popper’s Penguins is a classic tale that has enchanted young readers for generations. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Richard and Florence Atwater including rare photos from the authors’ estate.

Soviet Self-Hatred examines the imaginary Russian identities that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eliot Borenstein shows how these identities are best understood as balanced on a simple axis between pride and shame, shifting in response to Russia's standing in the global community, its anxieties about internal dissension and foreign threats, and its stark socioeconomic inequalities. Through close readings of Russian fiction, films, jokes, songs, fan culture, and Internet memes, Borenstein identifies and analyzes four distinct types with which Russians identify or project onto others. They are the sovok (the Soviet yokel); the New Russian (the despised, ridiculous nouveau riche), the vatnik (the belligerent, jingoistic patriot), and the Orc (the ultraviolent savage derived from a deliberate misreading of Tolkien's epic). Through these contested identities, Soviet Self-Hatred shows how stories people tell about themselves can, tragically, become the stories that others are forced to live.

Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.

Vladimir Propp is the Russian folklore specialist most widely known outside Russia thanks to the impact of his 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale-but Morphology is only the first of Propp's contributions to scholarship. This volume translates into English for the first time his book The Russian Folktale, which was based on a seminar on Russian folktales that Propp taught at Leningrad State University late in his life. Edited and translated by Sibelan Forrester, this English edition contains Propp's own text and is supplemented by notes from his students. The Russian Folktale begins with Propp's description of the folktale's aesthetic qualities and the history of the term; the history of folklore studies, first in Western Europe and then in Russia and the USSR; and the place of the folktale in the matrix of folk culture and folk oral creativity. The book presents Propp's key insight into the formulaic structure of Russian wonder tales (and less schematically than in Morphology, though in abbreviated form), and it devotes one chapter to each of the main types of Russian folktales: the wonder tale, the "novellistic" or everyday tale, the animal tale, and the cumulative tale. Even Propp's bibliography, included here, gives useful insight into the sources accessible to and used by Soviet scholars in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Propp's scholarly authority and his human warmth both emerge from this well-balanced and carefully structured series of lectures. An accessible introduction to the Russian folktale, it will serve readers interested in folklore and fairy-tale studies in addition to Russian history and cultural studies.