Harriet Murav is a Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative and World Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of six monographs, five co-edited books, and numerous articles on Russian and Yiddish literature and culture from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective; her latest book is As the Dust of the Earth: Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024). Together with Gennady Estraikh, she co-edited a volume of essays on the Yiddish poet David Hofshteyn, forthcoming in 2026. Murav has also co-translated David Bergelson’s novel Judgment (2017) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026). Her new project, Living Out of Time focuses on the theme of time, waiting, and wartime in contemporary Ukrainian poetry.
CONTRIBUTOR
Harriet Murav
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
RELATED ARTICLES
Review
Review of Shira Gorshman’s Hanah’s Sheep and Cattle, translated by Edith Otchin McCrea
Harriet Murav
An unflinching account of a woman who lived a passionate and committed life at a time of enormous destruction and chaos.
May 27, 2026
Blog
Teaching Guide to In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union
Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav
The stories gathered in In the Shadow of the Holocaust offer distinctive vantage points on how people continue to live after a catastrophe. We suggest some avenues for class discussion that offer a framework for approaching postwar Soviet Jewish writing as literature of persistence rather than of catastrophe alone.
Feb 23, 2026
Review
Review of Childe Harold of Dysna by Moyshe Kulbak, translated by Robert Adler Peckerar
Harriet Murav
Moyshe Kulbak’s Childe Harold of Dysna—a novel in verse that is inspired by Lord Byron and dramatizes the character of the Jewish flaneur—charms, delights, and brings a gentle sorrow.
Oct 31, 2021
Texts & Translation
דרײַ לידער
Three Poems
Leyb Kvitko
Translation by Harriet Murav and Zackary Sholem Berger
Three poems by Leyb Kvitko from his 1919 collection, Trit.
Mar 05, 2020
Texts & Translation
מידת־הדין
Harsh Judgment
David Bergelson
Translation by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav
Mides hadin (1929) is one of David Bergelson’s most innovative and experimental works. An aura of mystery infuses the opening chapter: three riders go out on an evening patrol that seems more like dream than reality.
Aug 14, 2015