“Untern fridlekhn himl”: Hirsh Reles and the Postwar Soviet Shtetl

• In Event: Yiddish Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe: New Insights

Abstract

Hirsh Reles, known as the “last native Yiddish-writer” of Belarus, produced a large oeuvre in Yiddish, Belarusian, and Russian. His Yiddish-language works in particular give vivid accounts of the remnants of shtetls in postwar Belarus as they tell the stories of those who survived genocide and devastation and are navigating Soviet postwar reconstruction efforts. They also offer a glimpse of prewar Jewish life and culture that have become invisible to most contemporary observers yet powerfully emerge through the memories of survivors and returnees. In sum, Reles’ works show the postwar life of surviving Jews alongside unknown yet familiar places in a language that is the only reminder of life and culture destroyed. At the same time, through works such as Reles’, Yiddish lives on despite Holocaust and the assault on Jewish cultural life in the postwar Soviet Union. The paper explores the productive tension between the form and central themes of Reles’ writing, placing it in the longer tradition of _rayzebilder_ (Yid.: travel pictures, travelogue) and analyzing his stories as unique forms of grappling with the destruction caused by the Shoah and Soviet commemorative practices that marginalize the distinctly Jewish experience of war and genocide.

Author

• Anika Walke, Carnegie Mellon U