Scenes of Encounter: American Jewish Writers from the Former Soviet Union with Sasha Senderovich

How were scenes of encounters between Jews in the Soviet Union and Jews from the United States depicted during the Cold War in the works of Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud, and Chaim Potok? How did the generation of Soviet-born Jewish authors, including Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, Gary Shteyngart, and Irina Reyn respond to and restage such encounters in their fiction, once they began to publish in their adopted language, English, at the turn of the 21st century? Approaching these questions with attention to cultural stereotypes, linguistic and cultural translation, and politics of the Cold War and its aftermath, this talk by Professor Sasha Senderovich considers how contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish immigrant authors in America grapples--frequently in satirical ways--with the legacy of migration of Jews from the former USSR.

About the speaker:

Sasha Senderovich is Assistant Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His published work includes a critical introduction and notes to the English-language translation of Moyshe Kulbak’s Soviet Yiddish novel The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga (Yale University Press, 2013), as well as articles on contemporary English-language fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States. Together with Harriet Murav, he is the translator of the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and, from Yiddish and Russian, of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (under contract with Stanford University Press). His first book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, is forthcoming (Harvard University Press, 2022). In addition to his academic work, Sasha has published literary and cultural criticism in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith, the Forward, the New York Times, the New Republic, The New Yorker’s Page-turner blog, and Jewish Currents (these articles can be found at his website. 

Related works:

Works by North American Jewish writers who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, compiled by Sasha Senderovich:

Novels and short stories (selected):
Yelena Akhtyorskaya, Panic in a Suitcase (2014)
David Bezmozgis, Natasha and Other Stories (2004)
                               The Free World (2011)
                               The Betrayers (2014)
                               Immigrant City (2019)
Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life (2014)
                          Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo (2016)
Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country (2018)
Mikhail Iossel, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (2021)
Nadia Kalman, The Cosmopolitans (2011)
Sana Krasikov, One More Year (2008)
                          The Patriots (2017)
Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (2007)
Irina Reyn, What Happened to Anna K. (2006)
                    The Imperial Wife (2016)
                    Mother Country (2019)
Zhanna Shlor, At the End of the World Turn Left (2021)
Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002)
                             Absurdistan (2006)
                            Super Sad True Love Story (2010)
                            Lake Success (2017)
                           Our Country Friends (2021)
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (2007)
                        Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (2014)
Lara Vapnyar, There Are Jews in My House (2003)
                        Memoirs of a Muse (2006)
                        Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (2008)
Olga Zilberbourg, Like Water and Other Stories (2019)

Essays (selected):
Follow the work of the following writers in various media outlets: 
Masha Kisel
Maggie Levantovskaya

Poetry (selected):
Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa (2004)
                          Deaf Republic (2019)
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, The Many Names for Mother (2018)
                                             Don’t Touch the Bones (2019)
Luisa Muradyan, American Radiance (2018)
Olga Livshin, A Life Replaced (2019)
Val Vinokur, Relative Genitive (2018)

Memoirs (selected):
Julia Alekseyeva, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (2017)
Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and Dinner Table (2019)
Masha Gessen, Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace (2005)
Sophia Shalmiyev, Mother Winter (2019)
Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure (2014)