Long overlooked, Soviet Jewish stories written after the Holocaust emerge in new translation |
The usual perception of Soviet Jewish literature after World War II is that there was none. The conversation around the decades after the Holocaust usually focuses on the refuseniks and large waves of emigration away from a place with a history of suppressing its Jewish minority.
A new collection of translated short stories by Soviet Jewish writers, originally published in the USSR in Russian and — mind-blowingly — in Yiddish, challenges that view. For someone who grew up in Ukraine and Russia not knowing much about my roots because my Jewish grandfather remained silent on the subject of anything Jewish, I read “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers From the Soviet Union” with a thirst I didn’t know I had.
In these 10 stories by seven authors, Jewish survivors are dealing directly with the ruins of a world that is no more. Unlike their American counterparts, however, they continue making a life in the proximity of the tragedy, among cemeteries and unmarked ravines. And despite the whims of their socialist empire, they don’t stay silent.
I sat down with the book’s translators — Sasha Senderovich, a professor in the Slavic department of the University of Washington, and Harriet Murav, professor emerita at the University of Illinois — to ask them what these texts reveal about our understanding of the Jewish experience.
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What inspired this project?
Harriet Murav: There is a perception in the educated reading audience that there’s really nothing about the Holocaust from the former Soviet Union. Unless you give people something to chew on, it’s hard to convince people. Our motivation was to provide the general reading audience and the college undergraduate audience with something to read.
Sasha Senderovich: Part of the project of the book was to show this was in plain sight. In several cases, the stories that were originally published in Yiddish were also published in the Russian translation, which further tells us they were accessible not just to Yiddish readers, but to a broader public.
I too had been under the wrong impression that Yiddish, both spoken and oral, disappeared entirely in the........