The pub­li­ca­tion of In the Shad­ow of the Holo­caust, a col­lec­tion of ten soul-shat­ter­ing sto­ries by a group of still rel­a­tive­ly unknown or under-read Russ­ian Jew­ish authors, rep­re­sents a major con­tri­bu­tion to Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture. Superbly intro­duced, edit­ed, and trans­lat­ed from the orig­i­nal Yid­dish and Russ­ian by Sasha Senderovich and Har­ri­et Murav, In the Shad­ow of the Holo­caust invites read­ers to enter a psy­chic land­scape filled with char­ac­ters who wan­der, uproot­ed and bent, in search of a lost home­land. They remain scarred by the trau­ma of war, their sleep trou­bled by unspeak­able night­mares that con­tin­ue to haunt the imag­i­na­tion of Russ­ian Jew­ry deep into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and beyond.

Fit­ting­ly, In the Shad­ow of the Holo­caust opens with David Bergelson’s aston­ish­ing sto­ry ​“A Wit­ness,” which appeared in Yid­dish in 1947, five years before Bergel­son was mur­dered in Stalin’s bloody purge of Jew­ish writ­ers. ​“A Wit­ness” cen­ters on an old Jew who is the sole sur­vivor of a death camp oper­at­ed in the near­by city of Lviv. His face is riv­en by trau­ma (“The old man’s black­ened face was rem­i­nis­cent of a burned stick of wood, res­cued from fire and flames”)and he has returned, seem­ing­ly from the liv­ing dead, seek­ing a wit­ness able to absorb — and thus trans­late — his suf­fer­ing. His self-appoint­ed office is to keep Jew­ish mem­o­ry alive: ​“It was imper­a­tive … that some­one write down what he had seen.” He finds an atten­tive trans­la­tor in Dora, a sur­ro­gate wit­ness able to trans­late his ​“Yid­dish” suf­fer­ing into the ver­nac­u­lar Russ­ian: A rich­ly lay­ered explo­ration of Holo­caust mem­o­ry and its lega­cies, ​“A Wit­ness” charts the mul­ti-direc­tion­al dimen­sion of Russ­ian Jew­ish his­to­ry dur­ing this hor­rif­ic time; among its wrench­ing rev­e­la­tions is the irrev­o­ca­ble pow­er of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, above all its abil­i­ty to acti­vate ​“A strong, ago­niz­ing long­ing,” ​“a deep yearn­ing,” via the injunc­tion that we remem­ber our dead.

A num­ber of sto­ries explore the ways Jew­ish mem­o­ry, under repres­sion in the Sovi­et Union (expres­sions of Jew­ish rit­u­al prac­tice were deemed sub­ver­sive, an act of unpa­tri­ot­ic ​“cos­mopoli­tanism” or, worse, ​“Zion­ist” resis­tance to the ideals of the Com­mu­nist state), breaks through, com­pelling a char­ac­ter to recall a once Jew­ish-sat­u­rat­ed life. In Shi­ra Gorshman’s ​“From House to House,” pub­lished in Yid­dish in 1974, Han­nah, afflict­ed with ​“painful, bit­ter mem­o­ries” wan­ders in her imag­i­na­tion through a well-remem­bered shtetl, recall­ing, in a sequence of vivid snap­shots, the ani­mat­ed lives of each house’s Jew­ish occupants. 

Lat­er sto­ries deep­en the collection’s core theme of Jew­ish mem­o­ry dis­lodged either by the ache of long­ing, or by the rev­e­la­tion of fam­i­ly secrets after World War II. Mem­o­ry, it turns out, can prove dis­rup­tive, apoc­a­lyp­tic; it can over­turn the already unsta­ble dynam­ic of fam­i­lies haunt­ed by the Holo­caust, shad­owed by its pal­pa­ble residues. ​“The best lie is the truth,” declares an old woman relat­ing her riv­et­ing Holo­caust sto­ry to the younger nar­ra­tor in Riv­ka Rubin’s ​“The Wall,” writ­ten and trans­lat­ed by the author from the orig­i­nal Yid­dish into Russ­ian in 1985. Her Holo­caust sto­ry involves a grand­child lost, a son replaced, over­whelm­ing guilt, even­tu­al rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, and uncon­solable grief. 

The last and longest piece in In the Shad­ow of the Holo­caust is ​“About Yosif,” a novel­la by Mar­gari­ta Khem­lin pub­lished in Russ­ian in 2007. ​“About Yosif” takes a deep dive into the enig­mat­ic behav­ior of its title char­ac­ter, a Sovi­et Jew afflict­ed with amne­sia regard­ing his atten­u­at­ed Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. Yosif remains, nev­er­the­less, obsessed with the arti­facts (which he col­lects), sounds (which he scratch­es out on an old vio­lin), lan­guage (he takes begin­ning Hebrew lessons), and the rit­u­als of Jew­ish mem­o­ry. Yosif thus embod­ies the Sovi­et Russ­ian Jew­ish conun­drum: he yearns for a Jew­ish past that remains illeg­i­ble, avail­able only in frag­ments that he can’t deci­pher. In the end Yosif plants a drei­del, hop­ing that it will grow Jew­ish roots.

Thanks to the superb edi­to­r­i­al labors of Pro­fes­sors Senderovich and Murav, this rich col­lec­tion intro­duces read­ers to a fas­ci­nat­ing archive of Jew­ish writ­ing. It rep­re­sents a major cul­tur­al achievement.