Description:

Postmemorial Constellations in Socialist and Postsocialist Holocaust Literature 

April 3rd, 12-1:30pm (EST)

Featuring:

McKenna Marko, Postdoctoral Researcher in Holocaust Literature at the University of Leeds

Benjamin Paloff, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan 

Leona Toker, Professor Emerita of English Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

This online roundtable three contributors in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature to discuss literary responses to the Holocaust from East/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union during and after state socialism. The roundtable probes how communist memory politics, censorship, and other histories of state-sanctioned terror such as the Gulag shaped the contexts, canonization, and circulation of Holocaust texts from the ‘East’. At the same time, it highlights how a lack of familiarity with the cultures of Eastern European Jewry in Western Europe and the US, taboos concerning what and how the Holocaust could be represented, and the marginalization of minor languages in the global Holocaust literary canon influenced past and present memory discourses. 

This event is part of an ongoing roundtable series featuring original research from the Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature hosted by HEFNU and other institutions in 2025.

Registration Required