Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in celebrating a new book translated by Dr. Sasha Senderovich: In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.

This event is co-sponsored by the Ellison Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and UW Slavic Languages and Literatures. Book sales, by Third Place Books, and book signing will follow the event.

Registration required: Register here.

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, with particular emphasis on the work of women writers. 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 in this collection 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.

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 (2026). 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, and the New Republic.