Tag: Soviet Union

New Perspectives on a Familiar Past: An Interview with Maxim Matusevich by Svetlana Satchkova

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Maxim Matusevich’s fiction is filled with people crossing borders — between countries, languages, identities, and versions of the past. That seems fitting for a writer whose own life has taken him from a communal apartment in Soviet Leningrad to army barracks, from pizza delivery in Oklahoma to academic archives in Nigeria, and eventually to a career as a historian and writer in the United States. Now Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Seton Hall University, Matusevich has recently published his first book of fiction, the short story collection Six Trains of No Return (Academic Studies Press, 2026). We spoke on Zoom about the unlikely path that led him to fiction, the relationship between history and memory, and why he keeps returning to lives shaped by displacement and reinvention.

— Svetlana Satchkova

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Seven Forty: Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marat Grinberg

~ Yelena Furman ~ 3 Comments
Memoirs of a Jew who prosecuted criminals in Soviet Ukraine – The Forward

We are happy to feature an excerpt from Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024), translated by Marat Grinberg, professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College and Goldis’s grandson. Grinberg’s previous book was the highly informative The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis University Press, 2022). The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf makes the original argument that, in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, Jews circumvented the proscriptions on public expression of Jewish identity “through their ‘reading practices'”: they built up home libraries of books on Jewish subjects, which, given “the heavy censorship of Jewish content,” they often had to read “between the lines” (the citations are from my review). Olga interviewed Marat about his book, and you can listen to their rich conversation here, which includes reading suggestions of the various writers the book discusses.

Continue reading “Seven Forty: Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marat Grinberg” →