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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). 

Sasha Senderovich is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022) and translator, with Harriet Murav, of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026) and David Bergelson’s novel Judgment (Northwestern University Press, 2017). He is an Associate Professor in Slavic Languages & Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies, and a faculty affiliate at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In an effort to pool the wisdom and questions acquired from our work in the classroom, In geveb regularly polls Yiddish language instructors on topics related to Yiddish pedagogy. In this installment: what textbook do you use with beginning students?