"This is one of my favorite books ever. By mere coincidence, it was written by my uncle. Worldly, ironic, and poetic, Barcelona Prose depicts extraordinary examples of dignity, solidarity and endurance. Efim and his friends wrote satires, mocked professors, laughed and loved in the worst years of the Stalinist terror. A dashing intelligence officer during World War II who, in disgrace after the war, wrote dissertations for Communist functionaries, Efim refashioned himself into a major Soviet cultural figure, and became a charismatic Parisian professor. In this book, Efim Etkind built a proper monument to the great - now dead - "longing for a world culture", by far the best part of the Soviet legacy. This universally- informed but distinctly Russian-Jewish culture was produced by a vigorous army of translators and philologists, for whom Efim Etkind was a leader. Everyone who is interested in Soviet culture, Jewish history, and the ironic arts of survival, will cherish this book."

- Alexander Etkind, Professor of History, European University Institute, Florence

"More than anything else, the memoiristic pieces in Barcelona Prose recount the scholar''s various encounters with the challenge of making moral choices (both his and others) in a heavily politicized environment. [P]erhaps most compelling about these essays, aside from the sharpness of remembered detail and the vividness of the different portraits, is that Etkind does not so much speak about his own moral choices, for the impression is consistently given that the choices were mostly second nature and not particularly agonized over, but about his witnessing of the moral choices of others."

- From the Afterword by David Bethea, Professor Emeritus in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison