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.
Together with Harriet Murav, I am currently translating, from Yiddish and Russian, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (under contract with Stanford Univ. Press, expected in 2024).
Together with Harriet Murav, I am currently translating, from Yiddish and Russian, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (under contract with Stanford Univ. Press, expected in 2024).
How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022)
My first book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made is in press and will be published in July 2022 by Harvard University Press.
The book can be pre-ordered here.
A close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.
“The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former empire. Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life, all embodied in the novel cultural figure of the Soviet Jew. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew as a particular kind of liminal being as he offers a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.”―Alice Nakhimovsky, author of Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
“With incisive exegesis, Senderovich develops a new reading of Soviet Jewish identity formation and expands the canon of twentieth-century Jewish writings in the process. This book establishes Senderovich as an important and original voice in Jewish literary studies.”―Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
“An erudite exploration of how Russian and Yiddish writers imagined a totally new kind of person, the Soviet Jew. Senderovich shows how war, revolution, and the first years of Soviet power made it possible to construct a Jewish figure and assign it competing ideological meanings. In that way, the Jews were like the Soviet Union itself. Disciplinarily wide-ranging and original, this book will excite readers.”―Gabriella Safran, author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky
“In this compelling book, Senderovich describes the new Jewish narratives that were born with the Soviet Union. Caught between the excitement of revolutionary messianism and the tragedy of mass violence, Soviet Jewish writers in both Yiddish and Russian created new Jewish archetypes that built on humor, folklore, and music and engaged with debates in Marxist philosophy. Two Jewish literary languages, in dialogue with one another, came to define a new Jewish culture with its own touchstones and ciphers.”―Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine
“Senderovich follows the Russian Jews as they navigated across space and time on their journey to becoming Soviet. In richly erudite readings of the most significant interwar works of Soviet Jewish literature, journalism, and cinema in Yiddish and Russian, he explores the convoluted creation process of a new Soviet Jewish identity and makes a strong case for a more nuanced and better informed understanding of the fluid relationship between the two components of this ambivalent hybrid formation.”―Mikhail Krutikov, author of Der Nister's Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People
The book can be pre-ordered here.
A close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.
“The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former empire. Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life, all embodied in the novel cultural figure of the Soviet Jew. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew as a particular kind of liminal being as he offers a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.”―Alice Nakhimovsky, author of Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
“With incisive exegesis, Senderovich develops a new reading of Soviet Jewish identity formation and expands the canon of twentieth-century Jewish writings in the process. This book establishes Senderovich as an important and original voice in Jewish literary studies.”―Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
“An erudite exploration of how Russian and Yiddish writers imagined a totally new kind of person, the Soviet Jew. Senderovich shows how war, revolution, and the first years of Soviet power made it possible to construct a Jewish figure and assign it competing ideological meanings. In that way, the Jews were like the Soviet Union itself. Disciplinarily wide-ranging and original, this book will excite readers.”―Gabriella Safran, author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky
“In this compelling book, Senderovich describes the new Jewish narratives that were born with the Soviet Union. Caught between the excitement of revolutionary messianism and the tragedy of mass violence, Soviet Jewish writers in both Yiddish and Russian created new Jewish archetypes that built on humor, folklore, and music and engaged with debates in Marxist philosophy. Two Jewish literary languages, in dialogue with one another, came to define a new Jewish culture with its own touchstones and ciphers.”―Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine
“Senderovich follows the Russian Jews as they navigated across space and time on their journey to becoming Soviet. In richly erudite readings of the most significant interwar works of Soviet Jewish literature, journalism, and cinema in Yiddish and Russian, he explores the convoluted creation process of a new Soviet Jewish identity and makes a strong case for a more nuanced and better informed understanding of the fluid relationship between the two components of this ambivalent hybrid formation.”―Mikhail Krutikov, author of Der Nister's Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People
Russian American Jewish immigrant literature
I've been writing, speaking, and teaching about contemporary literature by Soviet-born American Jewish émigré writers:
- Check out this teaching guide I wrote for the Yiddish Book Center's Teach Great Jewish Books project, on David Bezmozgis's short story "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist."
- "Not Just Russians, Not Just Jews: On New Works by Irina Reyn, Boris Fishman, and David Bezmozgis" (written together with Maggie Levantovskaya), Los Angeles Review of Books
- "A Road Trip Through America's Decline" (on Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success), Jewish Currents
- "Labeling the Russian Immigrant: Irina Reyn's The Imperial Wife," Los Angeles Review of Books
- "Masha Gessen Journeys to a Jewish Land Without Jews," The Forward
- "Ex-Soviets Adopt America" (essay on Boris Fishman's novel Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo), Los Angeles Review of Books
- An essay on The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis, The New Republic
- "Russian Jewish American Lit Goes Boom!" (essay on several novels), Tablet
- A review of Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart, Tablet
- Itty bitty reviews of Irina Reyn's novel What Happened to Anna K. and Nadia Kalman's wonderful novel The Cosmopolitans (The Jewniverse)
- Check out videos of my conversations with the writer Gary Shteyngart about immigration and Russian Jewish identity and about distopian literature and satire in the age of Trump, both within the Stroum Lecture series at the University of Washington (2018). We've done similar events at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, Vanderbilt, CUNY-Baruch, Lehigh, UConn, and CU Boulder.
- I've given talks and also taught guest seminars on this material at UPenn, Lafayette, UConn, Harvard, the Univ of Michigan, and in the Great Jewish Books program for high school students in Amherst, Mass., and in a number of community / adult ed settings.
- “Soviet Jews, Re-Imagined: Anglophone Émigré Writers from the former Soviet Union,” in David Brauner and Axel Staehler, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 90-104.
- "Scenes of Encounter: The 'Soviet Jew' in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America," in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 35:1 (cover-dated 2015; published 2016).
- "Teaching with Things: The Clutter of Russian Jewish American Literature," in Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubenstein, eds. Teaching Jewish American Literature (Modern Language Association of America, 2020), pp. 116-124.
David Bergelson's Judgment (Northwestern UP, Sept. 2017)
Translated by Harriet Murav & Sasha Senderovich
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:
Books talks and readings:
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:
- Order the book here or (better yet!) at your local bookstore
- Critical introduction to the novel by Sasha Senderovich & Harriet Murav
- Review (starred) at Kirkus Reviews (July 2017)
- Review at Publishers Weekly (July 2017)
- Review by Rokhl Kafrissen, Tablet Magazine (September 2017)
- Review by Rachel Cordasco, Book Riot (September 2017)
- Review by Boris Dralyuk, In geveb (November 2017)
- Review by Amelia M. Glaser, The Times Literary Supplement (Feb 2018)
- Review by Mikhail Krutikov, Slavic Review (2019)
Books talks and readings:
- Elliot Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA) -- January 8, 2018
- Columbia University (New York City) -- March 20, 2018
- CUNY-Baruch College (New York City) -- March 22, 2018
- Jewish Community Library (San Francisco) -- April 22, 2018
- Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA) -- April 23, 2018
Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners (Yale UP, 2013)
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:
Press about the book:
- Reading resources for the book by the Yiddish Book Center (2017)
- 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)
