Picturephoto by Mihaela Pacurar
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Slavic Department, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. I received my PhD in Slavic Lang. & Lit. from Harvard and taught at Tufts (as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow), Lafayette College, and Rutgers. Prior to coming to Seattle, I spent four years as an assistant professor of Russian and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I'm working on my my first monograph, How the Soviet Jew Was Made: Mobility and Culture after the Revolution.

David Bergelson's Judgment (Northwestern UP, 2017)
Translated by Harriet Murav & Sasha Senderovich

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Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era.
 
Set in 1920 during the Russian Civil War, Judgment (titled Mides-hadin in Yiddish) traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 Russian Revolution. As Bolshevik power expanded toward the border between Poland and Ukraine, Jews and non-Jews smuggled people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth. In the novel’s fictional town of Golikhovke, the Bolsheviks have established their local outpost in a former monastery, where the non-Jewish Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" and metes out punishments and executions to the prisoners held there: Yuzi Spivak, arrested for anti-Bolshevik activities; Aaron Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde" who believes she can appease Filipov with sex; and a memorable cast of toughs, smugglers, and criminals.
 
Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque, aphoristic style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry—confront the overwhelming, mysterious forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown. Murav and Senderovich’s new translation expertly captures Bergelson’s inimitable modernist style.

Press about the book:

Russian American Jewish immigrant literature

I've been writing, speaking, and teaching about contemporary literature by Soviet-born American Jewish émigré writers:

Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners (Yale UP, 2013)

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This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life. Translated by Hillel Halkin; Critical Introduction and Notes by Sasha Senderovich.

Press about the book:
  • Review by Madeleine Cohen in In geveb (2015)
  • Review by Sonia Isard on The Jewniverse (2014)
  • Interview with me by Mikhail Krutikov in Forverts (2013, in Yiddish)
  • Review by Mikhail Krutikov in The Yiddish Forward (2013, in Yiddish)
  • Review by Rokhl Kafrissen for the Jewish Book Council (2013)
  • Review by Ezra Glinter in The Forward (2013)
  • Review by Bryan Cheyette in The Times Literary Supplement (2013)
  • Podcast (41 minutes long) produced by the Yiddish Book Center (2013)
  • A study guide and essay on teaching the novel I wrote for In geveb (2015)