Drawing from his book How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Sasha Senderovich will present the Soviet Jew anew—as not only a minority but also as a particular kind of liminal being.  

After the revolution of 1917, many Jews who had previously lived in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities in different parts of the new Bolshevik state, 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 in Seattle. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. He is currently at work (also with Harriet Murav) on In the Shadow of the Holocaust, a collection of translated short stories by several different Yiddish- and Russian-language authors from the Soviet Union. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States and has also published work in Jewish Currents, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Forward, the New York Times, and elsewhere.