Thursday, April 9 | 6-7:30pm
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.
Join author Sasha Senderovich and moderator Deena Prichep for a talk about the authors, their translations, and how together they paint a complex picture of Soviet Jewish lives during and, just as importantly, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Senderovich will be available for questions and a book signing following the talk.
Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. With Harriet Murav, he translated David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (2017). He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). For over a decade, he has also been on the faculty of the Great Jewish Books program at the Yiddish Book Center; he has also written cultural criticism for a number of outlets, including Jewish Currents, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Republic. Learn more about his work here.
Deena Prichep is an award-winning reporter, writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. Her stories range from Soviet-era gastrodiplomacy to the changing response to transgender bathroom bills. Her writing has appeared on NPR, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Marketplace, Saveur, and The Oregonian. Learn more about her work here.