In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union

The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust 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 the stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust on Soviet territory, depicting memories, conflicts, love, and loss. These are not stories only about how people died, but how they continued to live: an entire family legacy is reduced to a single tea cup, the now raspy voice of a telephone that once never stopped ringing, and a train timetable that lists key places of Jewish life largely destroyed but still vital. Translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, these stories provide new perspectives on questions fundamental to literature of the Holocaust and legacies of other genocides and mass violence.

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 books are David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity (2019) and As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (2024).

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 • 314 Royce Hall • 2 PM
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union

Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington, Seattle) and
Harriet Murav (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Moderator: Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

The 1939 Society Program in Holocaust Studies

Lecture made possible by The 1939 Society, a division of Holocaust Museum Los Angeles

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