Jewish Studies Seminar: "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Translating Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union"

Despite a steady stream of scholarship and literary translation related to the Holocaust and its aftermath, very little literature published in the former USSR is available in English. In their current collaborative translation of eight different writers – some of whom wrote in Yiddish and others in Russian – Harriet Murav (U of I) and Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington) seek to capture a rich and complex cultural conversation about the nature of historical trauma and memory in texts written after and about the Holocaust. This seminar will outline a broader conceptual framework that will eventually form the introduction to this collection of translated short fiction, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.