Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (2026), edited and 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 such as Shira Gorshman, Rivka Rubin, David Bergelson, Itsik Kipnis, Margarita Khemlin, and others 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 memory, and the long, uneven afterlives of mass violence.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, United States. With Harriet Murav, he translated David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (2017) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). He has also written cultural criticism for a number of outlets, including Jewish Currents, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, and LitHub.