Reading List | In the Bloodlands: History and Memory of the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R. by Sasha Senderovich

On November 24, 2020, Sasha Senderovich gave a lecture in the series Lessons (Not) Learned from the Holocaust, entitled “In the Bloodlands: History and Memory of the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R.” Recommended readings and music from that lecture are listed below.


Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II  (If you choose to purchase the album, the physical disc—as opposed to a digital copy available through one of the streaming services—comes with a detailed booklet of information on the history of every song, and the translation of the lyrics from the Yiddish, into English and Russian.)

David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust

David Shneer, Grief: A Biography of a Holocaust Photograph

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Ant-Jewish Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust

Elissa Bemporad, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets

Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

Talia Lavin, My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (contains a very helpful chapter on the centrality of antisemitism in white nationalist ideologies).

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

Amelia GlaserSongs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, The Black Book of Soviet Jewry

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Ladies’ Tailor, directed by Leonid Gorovets (USSR, 1990)

Margarita Khemlin, Klotsvog (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden)

Friedrich Gorenstein, Redemption (translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield)

Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

Katja Petrowskaja, Maybe Esther (translated from German by Shelley Frisch)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Don’t Touch the Bones

Julia Alekseyeva, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution