Prof. Anika Walke presents on The Black Book of Russian Jewry
On October 16, 2025, Anika Walke, the inaugural Askwith Family Chair of Holocaust Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, visited the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to give a public talk on The Black Book of Russian Jewry, which was compiled and edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman in the mid to late 1940s. Her talk placed the book in conversation with the broader trend in Holocaust and genocide studies of thinking about the intersection of literature, testimony, and history through an interdisciplinary lens.
Professor Walke began by providing historical context for The Black Book of Russian Jewry, a collection of materials that document the mass murder of Soviet Jewish children, women, and men in German-occupied territories between 1941 to 1944. The book has become widely known for giving readers an inside look into the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, a demographic center of Eastern European Jewry. It is particularly notable as a record of Jewish cultural production during the war and in the postwar Soviet Union.
In the mid 1940s, Soviet Jews were grappling with not only the losses associated with genocide, but also their mounting persecution at home. Jewish theatres, publishing houses, schools, and other cultural and educational institutions were closed, effectively bringing Jewish public life to a standstill. The radicalization of Stalinist antisemitism led to the execution of several Soviet Jewish figures in August 1952 and eventual dissolution of the group compiling the book. Against this backdrop, Walke argued, The Black Book served as a critical assertion of Jewish presence within the Soviet Union.
As a result of Soviet officials blocking the publication of the book in 1943, multiple versions of the book – differing in language and content – were produced in an attempt to reach audiences beyond Soviet borders. In fact, the complete, uncensored Russian edition would not appear until 1993. Professor Walke argued that various editions of the black books should be considered as a series of distinct texts because of the significant differences of each collection. Considering the genre, she asserted that the black books are challenging to categorize due to the varied content that ranges from first person testimony to institutional documents to surveys of Nazi policy.
Exploring this complex interplay of content and history, two questions guided the talk: First, how should we read books that simultaneously use literary accounts and documentary materials? Second, how should we interpret a book that was never published for its intended audience or purpose? Professor Walke argued that the notion of “testimony of the second order” allows readers to consider the historical conditions surrounding the book’s production, while the notion of “documentary literature,” which aims to document, interpret, and reflect on both personal and collective experiences, offers a framework for thinking about the intention behind The Black Book’s production. In the context of literature from the Soviet Union, The Black Book was intended to serve as a call to action.
Professor Walke then outlined the book’s publication history. The project originated within the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, one of several anti-fascist groups organized under the Soviet Information Bureau to rally support for the war effort. In 1942, the Committee began working with American organizations to create a volume documenting Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union, drawing on earlier “black books” and parallel Polish documentation efforts. The Black Book of Russian Jewry began with the many letters that novelist Ilya Ehrenburg received during the early years of the war. These accounts were eventually published under the title Soviet Jews Write to Ilya Ehrenburg and contained letters and reports that detailed Nazi atrocities as well as the complicity of non-Jewish Soviet citizens.
By 1943, Ehrenburg and the Committee chose to use these letters as the foundation for The Black Book and began actively soliciting additional letters. A wide range of materials, including primary sources such as letters, testimonies, official documents, and journalists’ reports were received. Professor Walke showed a slide with portraits of the Committee’s literary commission, whose lesser-known members significantly shaped the volume by co-writing essays based on the materials that Ehrenburg and the Committee gathered. Throughout the process, the commission grappled with how to honor the specificity of Jewish experience under Nazi occupation while also crafting a book that would be accessible to a broad readership.
Further challenges emerged due to internal conflicts within the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. From 1944 to 1945, the Soviet Information bureau reviewed two separate manuscripts – one from the literary commission’s leader and one from the other committee members. Both drafts were criticized. Readers found the literary commission’s version, which was more historical in tone, to be overly critical of non-Jewish Soviet citizens and inadequately focused on the Germans as primary perpetrators. The committee’s version, meanwhile, was considered to be poorly written and overly centered on fear and exclusion at the expense of highlighting resistance and survival. The two versions were eventually merged in 1945 after the reviewers called for a single, comprehensive “political editing” that would deliver both a clear political message as well as a factual representation of German atrocities across the Soviet Union.
It was around this time that Ehrenburg published a separate Yiddish collection, Merger fun felker. There are a number of explanations provided by scholars that explain the reasoning behind this move, and Professor Walke referred to two: Ehrenburg’s desire to reach Soviet Jews who still read Yiddish and his increasing suspicion that a Russian edition of The Black Book may never be published considering the level of censorship at the time in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg’s suspicions were not unfounded, for the book’s manuscripts were seized and destroyed while printing was already underway in 1946.
Professor Walke then highlighted specific elements of The Black Book that have lent to her thinking about the text as a literary work. One prevailing belief about Soviet literature is that writers used literature as a means for speaking to and for the masses. She briefly discussed the editors’ desire to include material that would be more emotionally evocative, as well as the rhetorical strategies that were debated during committee meetings. These literary decisions, however, were for naught. Full acknowledgement of the book’s claims about Soviet participation in antisemitism conflicted with the nationalist narrative of Soviet aid and solidarity. As a result, accounts of antisemitic acts were excluded from the published volume and instead appeared in The Unknown Black Book.
The talk concluded with Professor Walke’s discussion of Vasily Grossman’s preface, which bears the imprint of the political pressures surrounding the The Black Book of Soviet Jewry’s production. In an effort to secure publication, Grossman celebrated Stalin and the Red Army with overtly nationalistic rhetoric while acknowledging the realities of the Holocaust for Soviet Jews and arguing for solidarity. As documentary literature, The Black Book is a testimony to the fraught conditions under which it was produced and published.
In the Q&A following the lecture, Professor Walke expanded on topics ranging from other contemporaneous Soviet texts and the process of censorship in the Soviet Union during the 1940s to the significance of emotion in determining genre. Professor Walke drew connections between The Black Book and larger patterns in Soviet cultural production. She closed by expressing hope for future collaborative work on the black books, given the complex, decades-long publishing history that continues to impact how the texts are understood and utilized in Holocaust Studies.