Remembering Our Past in a Different Present: The Holocaust and the War in Works of Post-Soviet Jewish Writers in North America

• In Event: Our Past Is All but Fragments: Collective Memory in Contemporary World Literature by Writers of Post-Soviet Origin

Abstract

For those from the former Soviet Union, collective memory is closely linked with collective trauma brought about by the Soviet regime and the ravages of WWII; for Soviet Jews, this trauma is also linked with a history of anti-Semitism, including the Holocaust-by-bullets, the Nazi mass extermination of Jewish populations in the region. The Holocaust and the war are themes in numerous works by writers from the former Soviet Union, including those who have immigrated to North America and who write about a shared Soviet past in English for a (largely) Western readership. This paper looks at how novels such as Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life (2014) and Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory (2024), among others, transpose Soviet-Jewish collective memory and pain into a North American context, with these writers acting as intermediaries preserving and making this past legible in a different present.

Author

• Yelena Furman, UCLA