Holocaust Trauma and Jewish Voice in Soviet Jewish Samizdat Periodicals

Abstract

For Jews living in the Soviet Union after World War II, Holocaust trauma was very often a personal, family, and communal matter. Starting in the mid-1960s, a cohort of Soviet Jews turned to uncensored spheres of knowledge production and began discussing the Holocaust in samizdat. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet Jewish samizdat periodicals came to the fore. While Soviet samizdat is a widely researched phenomenon, these periodicals – found in libraries and archives scattered across the world and partially reprinted and distributed from Jerusalem during the Cold War – require more in-depth study. This article sheds light on the importance of memory work among Jewish dissidents and refuseniks1 in the Soviet Union and beyond as reflected in the pages of these periodicals. It asks how, despite not prioritising the Holocaust as a central topic of interest, these samizdat periodicals became a platform for expressing grief related to wartime losses and the silencing of Holocaust memory in official Soviet discourse.