Sasha Senderovich presents 'The Zelmenyaners' by Moyshe Kulbak

Third Place Books welcomes the return of UW professor Sasha Senderovich to our Ravenna store! He'll be introducing new readers to the re-publication of , written by Moyshe Kulbak and translated from Yiddish by Hillel Halkin. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism.

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This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns– including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, and electric trolley– are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.

Sasha Senderovich is associate professor of Slavic, Jewish, and international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022). He has also published on Soviet-born American writers like Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn, and David Bezmozgis. Together with Harriet Murav, he is the translator of the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and, from Yiddish and Russian, of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (this project has received a 2023-2025 grant for Scholarly Editions and Translations from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the book is expected from Stanford University Press in 2026). He has also published essays on literary, cultural, and political topics in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, Jewish Currents, the New Republic, and elsewhere.

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist, and dramatist. He is the author of Childe Harold of Dysna and The Messiah of the House of Ephraim, among other works. He was arrested and executed in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit dozens of Yiddish and other writers and cultural activists throughout Soviet Belarus.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events

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