Professor Harriet Murav has won a prestigious NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Award for her collaborative translation of “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.”
Murav received the award with her collaborator Sasha Senderovich of the University of Washington. Together, they will work on an annotated English translation of ten Yiddish and Russian short stories written in the Soviet Union about the Soviet Jewish experience of World War II and the Holocaust.
Murav said the idea for this project dates back to 2017, when she and Senderovich published a translation of Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s “Judgment: A Novel” (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
“It dawned on us that if we want to teach students about this experience, there’s virtually nothing in translation,” said Murav. “We thought, ‘Here are these searing and important expressions of emotion, and no one has access to them. No one can read them because they haven’t been translated. Let’s give people a selection of works that they couldn’t touch otherwise.’”
The award came in the NEH’s third round of awards in 2023 and was one of just 280 projects funded nationwide, for a total of $41.3 million.
“I was stunned and delighted [when I heard the news,]” said Murav. “It’s competitive. These [author] names are not names that most people are familiar with, and I was just amazed.”
Murav said the award also affirms the importance of translation work, both on and off campus.
“I’m just really pleased that translation is receiving recognition as significant scholarly and creative work, as that was not always the case,” she said. “It’s a great affirmation of our work. [We ask], ‘Is it going to matter?’ Well, it does.”
While Murav said she doesn’t think in terms of impact when she works on a project like this, she does hope the translated words will resonate with future readers.
“I hope someone reads these words and gasps, or cries, or [laughs] at parts that are funny, or wants to read more, or changes their mind about these events and their representation,” she said.
Murav is a professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Center for Advanced Study. She is also a Catherine and Bruce Bastian Research Professor in Global and Transnational Studies and was recently named a Marjorie Roberts and Robert W. Schaefer Professor in Liberal Arts & Sciences. She also currently serves as interim head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature, which was recently reorganized from a program to a department.
Dania De La Hoya Rojas