Book excerpt: A chronicle of the Jewish community in the region they called medinat rusiya, "the land of Russia," a region severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and absorbed by Tsarist Russia in 1772, now in eastern Byelorussia. Fishman focuses on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR