Russian, Soviet-born, and post-Soviet Jewish immigrants have long contributed to Jewish American literature, film, journalism, and other forms of cultural expression. This panel, the first of its kind at MLA, uniquely focuses on contemporary Jewish immigrant writers from former Soviet republics, including: Anya Ulinish, Lara Vapnyar, David Bezmozgis, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Irina Reyn, Masha Gessen, Boris Fishman, Sana Krasikov, Michael Idov, Nadia Kalman, Ilya Kaminsky, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya. The richly layered works by these authors cross and recreate cultural, geographic, and linguistic boundaries. This panel explores and navigates this new multilingual terrain.

Through its focus on trans-immigrant experiences in writing by contemporary Soviet-born, Jewish writers in the Americas, this panel investigates multicultural, religious, and national identities; translation, multi- and trans-lingualism; poetics; and interwoven genres. Questions this panel will address include: How the experience of displacement, with its many implications, has complicated these writers’ encounters with their host culture; the ways secularism and Jewishness contribute to their sense of identity—and their sense of belonging and foreignness; and how material features of immigration figure in their forms of artistic expression. The field of Jewish American literature has long focused on Jewish immigrant writers from Russia who defined American literature and culture from the 1880s through the mid-20th century, and on second and third generation writers, through the present day. Examples include both classic and recent studies of key immigrant writers in English: Abraham Cahan (Chametzky, 1977; Eisenthal, 2020); Mary Antin (Sollers, 1997; Yudkoff, 2013); and Anzia Yezierska (Kessler-Harris, 1975; Ginsberg, 2016). Other immigrant writers are discussed in collections, such as Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001) and Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (2015). This panel on Soviet-born Jewish writers in the Americas takes the ongoing critical discussion to the most recent generation of Russian Jewish writers in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Panelists will speak to the issues in this contemporary body of works that bear relevance to the long-standing scholarly investigation of 19th-and 20th-century Jewish American immigrant literature. However, the academic study of these new Soviet-born Jewish American writers is itself new. The panelists are the most astute and promising voices in this developing field.

Karolina Krasuska examines novelistic settings that reimagine space, place, mobility, and belonging for a new immigrant class navigating a straddled sense of homeland located in both the US and the former USSR. She reads texts by Soviet-born Jewish writers in English, such as Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose “collective multiplicity of Euro-Asian settings” challenge the “imagined unity of ‘(post-)Soviet’” as a coherent category, and as “inviting potential reconfigurations and connections beyond the post-Cold War hierarchy of worlds.” Julia Dasbach investigates Ilya Kaminsky’s post-Soviet Holocaust writing and his cross-genre inventions, specifically, his use of the linguistic glossary, a unique genre for giving shape to Holocaust memory. Dasbach argues that Kaminsky “uses the glossary form to facilitate comprehension and communication” across boundaries of the linguistic and temporal, aural and visual, past and present, and to break the silence surrounding the traumatic extermination of Jews on Soviet soil. The glossary becomes a “mode of lyric witness” within a broader context of “the transhistorical, transatlantic, multigenerational, and multi-voiced worlds of Kaminksy’s collections.” Marat Grinberg looks at constructions of Soviet Jewish memory in the works of American and Canadian writers and filmmakers such as Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis, Lara Vapnyar and Michael Idov, in which “food, bookcases, and other objects become sites of personal and collective cultural memory.” Grinberg argues that “the trauma of immigration and generational divides shape and imbue these sites with both warped and identity-defining meanings.” For these reasons, such texts figure as modes for exploring Soviet Jewish heritage and its psychological and artistic influences. Maxim Shrayer, who has published extensively on the subject, revises the current perspective of literary translingualism in writing by exiles and expatriates from the Russian Empire in the context of writing by Jewish emigrés from the former USSR. Paying special attention to questions of “literary tradition, self-translation, and asynchronous composition,” Shrayer concludes with a personal reflection on his own translingual experience. Each paper relies on contemporary scholarship to frame and illuminate these recent works of literature, confirming and substantiating the next iteration of a long and rich tradition. Taken together, the work of this panel contributes meaningfully to growing this field of intellectual inquiry as the first-ever MLA panel on Soviet-born Jewish Writers.

The chair will strictly time these four papers; the respondent will succinctly frame key arguments and questions connecting the talks and leave fifteen minutes for audience discussion.