The Holocaust was underrepresented in the USSR’s official memory culture and literature and has remained a fraught topic for successor states (esp. Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine). Narratives and testimonies about the “Holocaust by bullets” except for Babyn Yar are also scarce in other literatures. Though the former Jewish pale of settlement was a major killing site during World War II, Holocaust literature from the region plays an insignificant role in the literary canon of the Holocaust and more broadly in cultural memory. The project aims to present the aesthetic challenges of narrativizing the “dispersed Holocaust” and to introduce seminal texts that address the complicated and fraught making of Holocaust literature in Soviet times. The goal is to further the integration of texts representing the “dispersed Holocaust” and this specific Jewish experience into the world literary canon and memorial culture. The project is structured by the following research questions: How does the lack of available testimony shape fictionalization and genre in literatures of the region? What is the significance of the unprocessed archive in relation to catastrophic writing? What are the after-effects of this literary history in today’s transnational second- and third-generation writing? How did the inherent multilingualism of the Jewish experience complicate mnemonic transmission? And finally, how does the lack of accessible testimony enable the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in contemporary conflicts?

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