Please join CSEEES and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in welcoming Harriet Murav and Sasha Senerovich to present their recent monographs:
Harriet Murav, As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024, winner of the 2024 Heldt Prize for best book introducing new, innovative, and/or underrepresented perspectives into any area of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies)
As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine is about poetry and catastrophe, violence and relief work, artistic literature and documentation, injury and care. I discuss these topics through the lens of the Jewish concept of “hefker,” originating in property law, where it refers to objects that are ownerless and up for grabs. I explore the multivalence of the hefker concept as a legal, poetic, existential, and political/social term, showing how Yiddish poets, Russian language authors, aid workers, and medical professionals—all responding to the pogroms of the Russian Civil War—used the multivalent Hebrew term hefker to describe and conceptualize the experience of mass public violence. To declare a population or individual beyond the realm of law, to act with abandon, to abandon an object, to abandon your ego--these are some of the ways the term evolved. The talk focuses on Yiddish literature, especially the Yiddish author Itsik Kipnis, whose 1926 pogrom novel Months and Days was the point of departure for this study.
Harriet Murav recently retired as a Marjorie Roberts Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Center for Advanced Study Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of six monographs, five co-edited books, and numerous articles on Russian and Yiddish literature and culture from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, Murav has also co-translated David Bergelson’s Judgment (2017) and is co-translating a selection of Yiddish and Russian stories, In the Shadow of the War: Russian Jewish Writers after the Holocaust, under contract with Stanford University Press. Her new project, Living Out of Time focuses on the theme of time, waiting, and wartime in contemporary Ukrainian poetry.
Sasha Senderovich, How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022; finalist for National Jewish Books Award and 2023 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, AATSEEL, Best First Book Award).
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. The Pale of Settlement on the empire's western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. 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.
Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington Seattle. He's the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022) and, together with Harriet Murav, translator of David Bergelson's Yiddish novel Judgment (2017) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (forthcoming, 2026). The latter project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
