In the Shadow of the Holocaust

Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union

Harriet Murav editor Sasha Senderovich editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Stanford University Press

Published:10th Feb '26

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust cover

A first-of-its kind collection of short stories that provides an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union.

  A death camp survivor asks a local woman to write down in Russian his story, which he conveys in Yiddish. The Jewish population of Kyiv makes a pilgrimage to the site of a massacre on its anniversary. A single teacup becomes the focal point of a Jewish family's complex history. These are just three of the stories featured in In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, a collection of newly translated short fiction written in the aftermath of one of the most significant Jewish tragedies of the 20th century. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live.

  Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. The significance of the texts they wrote, however, has remained largely neglected. This volume brings these compelling stories to light, providing readers with critical, annotated translations of authors who wrote in richly diverse ways in the shadow of World War II.

  The voices brought together in In the Shadow of the Holocaust create a distinct chorus of personal, idiosyncratic experiences of loss and provide new perspectives on questions fundamental to literature of the Holocaust, the legacies of genocide, and the nature of historical trauma and memory.

"'Who today is not a witness?' asks one of the characters in this endlessly compelling collection. What Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav give us here is the painstaking, thoughtful and necessary work of rediscovery." —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

"This beautifully translated and expertly edited collection opens a window into an era seemingly lost to Holocaust Studies. Truly one of the most significant and original additions to Holocaust literature in the last forty years." —James E. Young, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"At last, English-language readers have a comprehensive collection of Soviet Holocaust fiction. Senderovich and Murav have put together a collection of source texts that will give access to an understudied area of East European literature." —Amelia Glaser, University of California, San Diego

"In the Shadow of the Holocaust brings the English-language reader a part of Jewish culture that has remained on the fringes of the American mainstream to this day. This is a branch of Holocaust literature that fell victim to the cultural cold war between America and the Soviet Union. The Soviet authors tell us about the Holocaust not from far away in America or Israel, but actually from the places where the destruction took place. Here things often speak louder than people, because the things remain the only witnesses who survived it all." —Mikhail Krutikov, The Forward

"The memorialisation [of Nazi genocide in the Soviet Union] took place privately in kitchens, in discussions, in letters, and in written and oral accounts such as the short story masterpiece 'A Witness' by David Bergelson, in which the character known as 'the Jew' recounts his harrowing witness statement to another survivor, Dora. Bergelson's story opens the collection and sets the tone. This is a book that lives on in the reader's consciousness not least because it is we who are now responsible for the handing on of memory." —Sasha Dugdale, Jewish Renaissance

ISBN: 9781503632400

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

260 pages

New edition