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by Sasha Senderovich (Editor), Harriet Murav (Editor)
A first-of-its kind collection of short stories that provides an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union.
A death camp survivor asks a local woman to write down in Russian his story, which he conveys in Yiddish. The Jewish population of Kyiv makes a pilgrimage to the site of a massacre on its anniversary. A single teacup becomes the focal point of a Jewish family's complex history. These are just three of the stories featured in In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, a collection of newly translated short fiction written in the aftermath of one of the most significant Jewish tragedies of the 20th century. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live.
Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. The significance of the texts they wrote, however, has remained largely neglected. This volume brings these compelling stories to light, providing readers with critical, annotated translations of authors who wrote in richly diverse ways in the shadow of World War II.
The voices brought together in In the Shadow of the Holocaust create a distinct chorus of personal, idiosyncratic experiences of loss and provide new perspectives on questions fundamental to literature of the Holocaust, the legacies of genocide, and the nature of historical trauma and memory.
Author Biography
Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. With Harriet Murav, he translated David Bergelson's Judgment: A Novel (2017). He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent book is As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (2024).
