Abstract
This chapter focuses on literary texts by Jewish North American authors writing in English who as children or teenagers arrived from the (former) Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s and who have successfully carved out a niche for themselves on the American literary scene. These “post-Soviet Jewish North-American writers” are of the same age cohort as the generation producing canonical third-generation Holocaust narratives. Yet the presence of Holocaust postmemory in their writing is in stark contrast to such writers as Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nathan Englander. In David Bezmozgis’s, Lara Vapnyar’s, and Boris Fishman’s work, this contrast stems from the different modes of memory and postmemory punctuating their texts. In their often autobiographical novels, short stories, and graphic memoirs, these writers produce a new mode of Holocaust postmemory that is inflected by their immigrant positioning and Soviet memory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Aarons, Victoria, ed. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.
Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
Alekseyeva, Julia. Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2017.
Altshuler, Mordechai. “Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR Under Stalin.” Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 271–296.
Amar, Tarik. “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory.” In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 158–183. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Arad, Yitzhak. The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Translated by Ora Cummings. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Assmann, Aleida. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 261–273.
Bezmozgis, David. “An Animal to the Memory.” In Natasha and Other Stories, 65–78. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
———. The Free World: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
“Certain Jews Who Fled Nazi Advance from Areas Never Occupied Will Receive One-Time Compensation; Certain Orphans, Western Persecutees Also to Be Paid.” claimscon.org. Last modified December 15, 2011. http://www.claimscon.org/2011/12/hardship-fund/.
Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Edele, Mark, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds. Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017.
Erll, Astrid. “Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory.” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 385–409.
Fishman, Boris. A Replacement Life: A Novel. New York: Harper, 2014.
Gershenson, Olga. The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Gitelman, Zvi. “The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation.” In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 185–192. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Goldlust, John. “A Different Silence: The Survival of More Than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union During World War II as a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia.” In Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, edited by Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, 29–94. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017.
Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Jeges, Edit. “Gendering the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis of a Memoir and a Video Testimony by Olga Lengyel.” In Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, edited by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, 233–253. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2015.
Jilovsky, Esther, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki. “The Third Generation.” In In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, edited by Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki, 1–14. Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015.
Katsnelson, Anna, ed. “The New Wave of Russian Jewish American Culture.” Special issue, East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016).
Krasikov, Sana. The Patriots: A Novel. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017.
Krasuska, Karolina. “Narratives of Generationality in 21st-Century North American Jewish Literature: Krauss, Bezmozgis, Kalman.” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016): 285–310.
Murav, Harriet. Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Osborne, Monica. “Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 149–160. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Paulsson, Gunnar S. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Rosenbaum, Alan. “The Holocaust in the USSR and the Memorial Calendar.” The Jerusalem Post online. Last modified December 13, 2018. https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/The-Holocaust-in-the-USSR-and-the-memorial-calendar-574304.
Roskies, David G., and Naomi Diamant. Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012.
Rovner, Adam. “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic.” AJS Review 30, no. 2 (November 2006): 313–324.
Ryan, Karen. “Failures of Domesticity in Contemporary Russian-American Literature: Vapnyar, Krasikov, Ulinich, and Reyn.” Transcultural 1, no. 4 (2011): 63–75.
Sarna, Jonathan D., Dov Maimon, and Shmuel Rosner. Toward a Comprehensive Policy Planning for Russian-Speaking Jews in North America. Jerusalem: Barbara and Jack Kay Center for Communal Life at the JPPI, 2013. http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Toward_a_Comprehensive_Policy_Planning_for_Russian-Speaking_Jews_in_North_America.pdf.
Senderovich, Sasha. “Russian Jewish American Lit Goes Boom!” Tablet. Last modified June 17, 2014. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/175906/russian-jewish-am-lit.
———. “Scenes of Encounter: The ‘Soviet Jew’ in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America.” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2016): 98–132.
Shneer, David. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. London: Granta Books, 2010.
———. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.
Slucki, David. “The Third Generation and the Responsibility to Remember.” In In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, edited by Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki, 295–308. Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015.
Stier, Oren Baruch. “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (March 2005): 81–106.
Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Viking, 2007.
Vapnyar, Lara. “Love Lessons-Mondays, 9 A.M.” In There Are Jews in My House, 120–149. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
———. “There Are Jews in My House.” In There Are Jews in My House, 3–50. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
———. The Scent of Pine: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Wanner, Adrian. “Moving Beyond the Russian-American Ghetto: The Fiction of Keith Gessen and Michael Idov.” The Russian Review 73, no. 2 (April 2014): 281–296.
Zeltser, Arkadi. “The Subject of ‘Jews in Babi Yar’ in the Soviet Union in the Years 1941–1945.” Translated by Michael Sigal. yadvashem.org. www.yadvashem.org/research/about/mirilashvili-center/articles/babi-yar.html. Accessed 14 December 2018.
———. Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union. Translated by A. S. Brown. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Krasuska, K. (2020). Post-Soviet Migrant Memory of the Holocaust . In: Aarons, V., Lassner, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33427-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33428-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)