In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Translating Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union
Join us for an in-person book talk at UCL
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Translating Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union
26 Feb 2026, 18:00 – 20:00
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.
Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies
University of Washington
Sasha Senderovich is a Harvard‑trained scholar of Slavic and Jewish literature, author of 'How the Soviet Jew Was Made' and a co‑translator of major Yiddish and Russian works. His research spans Soviet Jewish culture and contemporary émigré fiction, and his writing appears widely in literary and public outlets. He also teaches in the Great Jewish Books summer program.
Further information
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Cost
Free
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All
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Yes
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