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

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 Literatures

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

The Black Book of Russian Jewry is a collection of texts describing the mass murder of Soviet Jewish children, women, and men by the German occupation regime between 1941 and 1944. Combining first-person testimonies, letters, diary entries, institutional documentation, and writers’ accounts based on primary source material, the volume provides an inside view of the Holocaust in what used to be the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, a center of Eastern European Jewry. In this talk, Prof. Anika Walke discusses the challenges of placing the book between or within the realms of literature and history. She argues that The Black Book is testimony of the second order and an exemplary outcome of competing representational demands occasioned by genocidal violence and its aftermath.

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Read more about the event here.

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

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.