photo by Mihaela Pacurar
Since Fall 2013 I've been an Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and Jewish Studies at the Univ. of Colorado Boulder. In Fall 2017 I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Slavic Department and the Jackson School of International Studies, and a faculty affiliate at the Stroum Center for Jewish 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. I'm writing my first book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made: Mobility and Culture after the Revolution.
What's new: Russian American Jewish immigrant literature
I've been writing, speaking, and teaching about contemporary literature by Soviet-born American Jewish émigré writers:
- "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 a video recording of my conversation with the writer Gary Shteyngart at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia in May 2015. We've done similar events at 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 (peer reviewed).
- "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; peer-reviewed)
Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners
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)
