photo 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, 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:
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 (Sept 2017)
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 (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)
