Book:
How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, July 2022)
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 tsarist empire. In particular, the Bolshevik government eliminated the requirement that most Jews reside in the Pale of Settlement in what had been Russia’s western borderlands. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.
This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew―not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.
Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.
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 tsarist empire. In particular, the Bolshevik government eliminated the requirement that most Jews reside in the Pale of Settlement in what had been Russia’s western borderlands. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.
This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew―not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.
Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.
Articles and chapters (peer-reviewed):
- "First as Comedy, Then as Nationalism: The Immigrant Post-Soviet Novel Between America and Israel" (co-authored with Alex Moshkin), in Julie Buckler and Justin Weir, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel (Oxford University Press, expected 2023)
- "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. Read full text here; read the volume's table of contents here.
- "David Bergelson's Judgment: A Critical Introduction," in David Bergelson, Judgment: A Novel, translated by Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); co-authored with Harriet Murav. Read the full text here.
- “Scenes of Encounter: The ‘Soviet Jew’ in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America” (Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 35:1, cover-dated 2015, published 2016). Read the full text here.
- “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, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 90-104. Read the full text of the article here.
- A Critical Introduction in Moyshe Kulbak, The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga, translated by Hillel Halkin (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. vii-xxxiv. Read the full text here.
- "The Hershele Maze: Isaac Babel and His Ghost Reader," in Justin Cammy et al (eds.) Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 233-254. Read the full text of the article here.
- "In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees," in Joseph Sherman, ed. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Oxford, UK: Legenda, 2007), pp. 150-166. Read the full text of the article here.
Book-length literary translations (peer-reviewed):
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union
David Bergelson, Judgment: A Novel [Mides-hadin].
Translated from the Yiddish, and with introduction and notes by Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich. Part of the Northwestern World Classics series (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
- Co-translated from Russian and Yiddish with Harriet Murav.
- Under advance contract with Stanford Univ. Press (expected in 2024).
- A collection of short stories by six different authors, all written and published after the Second World War and the Holocaust--about and in the shadow of these events in the Soviet Union.
David Bergelson, Judgment: A Novel [Mides-hadin].
Translated from the Yiddish, and with introduction and notes by Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich. Part of the Northwestern World Classics series (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Reference:
- “Brezhnev (2005),” in Birgit Beumers, ed. Directory of World Cinema: Russia, vol. 2 (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2015)
- “The Cranes are Flying (1957),” in Birgit Beumers, ed. World Film Locations: Moscow (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2014)
- "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears (1979)," in Birgit Beumers, ed. World Film Locations: Moscow (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2014)
