"Vassily Grossman: expanding the European canon of Holocaust literature"

Polly Zavadivker joins IIJS to discuss works of Vasily Grossman in the context of European Holocaust literature.

Wednesday, November 11, at noon | 617 Kent Hall.

The Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman was one of the first European writers to document what came to be called the Holocaust. His writings about the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka death camp, and mass shooting sites in Ukraine were known to his contemporaries, yet until recently, and in translation, received far less attention among Western audiences. This talk makes the case for placing Grossman’s wartime essays and postwar novels in dialogue with well-known literary and philosophical texts about the Holocaust and totalitarianism, including those of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt.

Polly Zavadivker is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Delaware. Her book, A Nation of Refugees: World War I and Russia’s Jews (Oxford University Press, 2024), received the Lincoln Book Prize, was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, and received an Honorable Mention for the Salo Baron Book Prize. She also edited and translated S. An-sky’s The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front (Indiana University Press, 2016). In two current projects, she examines the life of Holocaust survivor Abraham Turow and the works of Vasily Grossman in the context of European Holocaust literature.

*Guests must register by Monday, November 9, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

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