In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Translating Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union

An in-person event at UCL

The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust, translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, recovers a range of compelling voices that had been scarcely known or translated. Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus—some writing in Yiddish and others in Russian—tell stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust on Soviet territory, depicting memory, conflict, love, and loss. Writers including Shira Gorshman, Rivka Rubin, David Bergelson, Dina Kalinovskaya, and Margarita Khemlin offer especially powerful perspectives on survival in the aftermath of genocide. These are not stories only about how people died, but about how they continued to live and make meaning. In this talk, Sasha Senderovich will discuss how these works, and the act of translating them, open new ways of thinking about Holocaust literature, Soviet Jewish history, and the long, uneven afterlives of mass violence.