Featured photo – Professor Sasha Senderovich and co-translator Harriet Murav
The publication of IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST : SHORT FICTION BY JEWISH WRITERS FROM THE SOVIET UNION, edited by Sarah Senderovich, is a collection of ten soul-wrenching stories by a group of still relatively unknown or under-read Russian Jewish authors, represents a major contribution to Jewish literature.
Superbly introduced, edited, and translated from the original Yiddish and Russian by Sarah Senderovich and Harriet Murav, the book invites the reader to enter a psychic landscape filled with wandering characters, uprooted and bent in search of a lost homeland. They remain scarred by the trauma of war, their sleep troubled by unspeakable nightmares that continue to haunt the imagination of Russian Jewry deep into the 20th century and beyond.
The first story is David Bergelson’s astonishing tale “A Witness,” which first appeared in 1947 in Yiddish, five years before he was murdered in Stalin’s bloody purge of Jewish writers. It centres an old Jew who is the sole survivor of a death camp operated in nearby city of Lviv. His face is riven by trauma and he has returned, seemingly from the living dead, seeking a witness, able to translate his suffering.
His sole purpose is to keep Jewish memory alive. He finds an attentive translator in Dora, a surrogate witness able to translate his “Yiddish” into vernacular Russian. “A Witness” charts the multi directional dimension of Jewish history during this horrific time. Its revelations are irrevocably the power of Jewish identity. A number of stories explore the ways Jewish memory under repression in the Soviet Union and how expressions of ritual practice was deemed subversive, unpatriotic, a resistance to the ideals of the Communist state. Its a plaintive cry for the loss of a once Jewish-saturated life.
In Shira Gorshman’s “From House to House,” Hannah, afflicted with painful, bitter memories, wanders in her imagination, through a well- remembered shtetl, recalling, in a sequence of vivid snapshots, the animated lives of each house’s occupants.
Later stories deepen the book’s core theme of memories dislodged either by the ache of longing, or by the revelation of family secrets after World War II. Memory, it turns out, can prove disruptive, apocalyptic, sometimes overturning the already unstable dynamic of families haunted by the Holocaust and its palpable residues. “The best lie is the truth” declares an old woman relating her riveting story to a younger narrator in RIvka Rubin’s “The Waiting” translated in 1985. Her Holocaust story involves a grandchild lost, a son replaced, overwhelming guilt, eventual reconciliation, and inconsolable grief.
The last and longest piece is about ”Yosif”, a novella by Margarita Khemlin, published in 2007. It takes a deep dive into the enigmatic behaviour of its title character, a Soviet Jew afflicted with amnesia regarding his identity. Yosif, remains, nevertheless obsessed with the artefacts he collects, sounds he scratches out on an old violin, language and ritual of Jewish memory. Yosif embodies the Soviet Union conundrum: the yearnings for years of a Jewish past that remains illegible, available only in fragments he can’t decipher.
This is a book about storytelling, rich as an introduction to a fascinating archive of Jewish writings, providing an unappreciated perspective on the Holocaust.
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, edited and translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, was published by Stanford University Press on February 10, 2026. This collection features translated stories originally written in Yiddish and Russian by various Soviet Jewish authors
