Testimony, History, and Literature:
The Black Book of Soviet Jewry

October 16, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Taper Hall (THH), Room 309K
Join us in person or on Zoom

A public lecture by  Prof. Anika Walke (Askwith Family Chair of Holocaust Studies, Carnegie Mellon University)

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Cosponsored by the USC Department of Slavic Languages and Literature

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

The Black Book of Russian Jewry, compiled and edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, is widely known as a collection of texts describing the mass murder of Soviet Jewish children, women, and men by the German occupation regime, 1941-1944. Readers appreciate the book for its inside view of the Holocaust in what used to be the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, a demographic center of Eastern European Jewry. The Black Book marks an important aspect of Jewish cultural production in the wartime and postwar Soviet Union, and much has been written about Soviet censorship of the volume as an indicator of postwar Stalinist antisemitism.

To a lesser extent, The Black Book has been explored as an extraordinary example of writing that challenges us to probe the categories of the testimonial and the literary. Combining first-person testimonies, letters, diary entries, institutional documentation, and writers’ accounts based on primary source material, the book is difficult to place between or within the realms of literature and history. Based on a review of the book’s publication history and a close reading of documented editorial discussions and selections from the book, Professor Walke proposes to recognize The Black Book as a testimony of the second order. Such testimony calls for a consideration of the volume’s content alongside the context of writing, editing, and publishing about the Holocaust in the postwar Soviet Union. Traversing the boundaries between historical and literary writing, The Black Book is an exemplary outcome of competing representational demands occasioned by genocidal violence and its aftermath.

This talk is based on a chapter Professor Walke authored for the forthcoming volume The Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature.

REGISTER HERE

Lunch will be served.

Anika Walke recently joined Carnegie Mellon University as the Inaugural Askwith Family Chair in Holocaust Studies. Prior to that, she served as Associate Professor of History and Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests include World War II and Nazi genocide, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe. Her publications include the book Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015), the co-edited Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia (Indiana UP 2017), and a number of peer reviewed articles and book chapters on the history and memory of the Holocaust and on Soviet Jewish lives more broadly. She is currently working on a new monograph on the long aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II in Belarus. From 2014 to 2022, Anika Walke served as Co-PI of “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events,” an NEH-funded endeavor of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative to develop a Historical GIS of Nazi-era ghettos in Eastern Europe. In addition, she has held a range of fellowships including most recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at Freiburg University in Germany (Spring 2024).

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