Addressing the Void: The Absence of Documents and the Difficulties of Representing the Shoah in Postcatastrophic Russian Jewish Literature

Abstract

Despite the high number of Soviet Jewish victims, Russian literature is marked by a relative scarcity of literary Shoah representations in comparison to other European literatures. This chapter states that the suppression of Shoah testimony and documents due to the different nature of the “dispersed Holocaust,” latent antisemitism, and Soviet commemorative practices that focused on heroes and not victims, has had a detrimental effect on Russian literary discourse until today. Nevertheless, postcatastrophic representations in form of memoirs and fiction do exist. Looking at texts written in Russian by authors like Liudmila Ulitskaia or Mariia Stepanova, and comparing them with transnational Russian Jewish authors such as Vladimir Vertlib, Boris Fishman, and others, this chapter attempts to show how different discursive environments influence postcatastrophic writing. It asks how Russian literature deals with these representational and documentational challenges? How does it confront the entanglement of different traumatic events such as the Stalinist persecutions, the Gulag, and the Shoah. This chapter concludes by comparing texts written by Russian Jewish authors in Russian, German, and English.