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Long overlooked, Soviet Jewish stories written after the Holocaust emerge in new translation

JL;DR SUMMARY A new collection of short stories has emerged, bringing attention to the overlooked Soviet Jewish literature written after World War II. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustYiddishJewish ExperienceTranslationCultural MemorySoviet Jewish LiteratureRussianPost War UssrSasha SenderovichHarriet Murav

Places mentioned

Lviv, Lvivshchyna, Ukraine
"In the opening story by David Bergelson, an old Jew recounts his sole survival in an extermination camp near Lviv to a Yiddish-Russian translator and says, The suffering was in Yiddish."
Ukraine
"Join Sasha Vasilyuk in conversation with JTAs Philissa Cramer on Tuesday, Feb. 24, for a conversation marking four years of war in Ukraine."
Russian Federation
"A new collection of translated short stories by Soviet Jewish writers, originally published in the USSR in Russian and mind-blowingly in Yiddish, challenges that view."
Illinois, United States
"I sat down with the books translators Sasha Senderovich, a professor in the Slavic department of the University of Washington, and Harriet Murav, professor emerita at the University of Illinois to ask them what these texts reveal about our understanding of the Jewish experience."
Kyiv, Ukraine
"When I was researching something in Kyiv, I went to the cinema and photography archive and they said, Oh youre interested in the genocide?"
Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russian Federation
"I remember going to the movie theater in Ufa to watch a two-part film on Wandering Stars, Shalom Aleichems novel."
New Jersey, United States
"HM: My father was a native speaker of Yiddish. I didnt grow up speaking it in northern New Jersey, but it was part of our world."
Washington, United States
"I sat down with the books translators Sasha Senderovich, a professor in the Slavic department of the University of Washington, and Harriet Murav, professor emerita at the University of Illinois to ask them what these texts reveal about our understanding of the Jewish experience."
Israel
"Also, every issue had English language summaries of the contents because people subscribed to it in the U.S. and Israel."

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Retrieved 2026-02-21 05:31:12 UTC
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