Join Marat Grinberg and Olga Zilberbourg for a discussion about The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. The two will explore author Marat Grinberg’s original investigation into the reading strategies and uses of books by Jews in the Soviet era, whose bookshelves were often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes.
Admission: $5 for general admission, free for OJMCE members with code on back of membership card.
Location: Zoom
A link to the zoom webinar will be sent 24 hours before the event and new ticket purchases will be monitored periodically leading up to the 5pm (pacific) start time.
About the Speakers
- Marat Grinberg immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1993, graduated from the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University in New York City in 1999, and received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2006. A scholar of Jewish and Russian literature and culture, and of cinema, he is a Professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Among Grinberg’s books are “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016) and, most recently, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). Grinberg is the translator and editor of the just published Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine. Marat Grinberg’s essays have appeared in Tablet Magazine, Jewish Journal, Mosaic, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Currently he’s working on a study of Jewishness and the Holocaust in Russian, Ukrainian, and East European speculative fiction of the Soviet era.
- Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also deals with bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Confrontation, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
