Anastasia Felcher

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (10/2022 – 08/2023)

Debates on the Holocaust in Jewish Samizdat: Political Agenda, Self-Identification and Memory Work

This project aims to research the cultural afterlife of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as ir appeared in the pages of uncensored publications, books, magazines and petitions - the so-called Jewish samizdat. The aim is to show the political and memorial functions of coming to terms with the traumatic past on the pages of banned texts on Jewish subjects. Non-conformist political and cultural-literary works of Jewish samizdat were unsystematically produced throughout the country in the late 1960s to late 1980s. These texts, distributed through unofficial channels, supported the Jewish struggle to emigrate from the Soviet Union. This research is an attempt to understand the interplay between uncensored media, Jewish nationalism and Holocaust remembrance under the restrictive conditions of Soviet state policy, memory politics and the cult of victory during World War II.

Anastasia Felcher , historian and cultural heritage researcher. PhD 2016 in Cultural Heritage Management and Development at the Scuola IMT Alto Studi Lucca. Since 2020, archivist for the Slavic collection at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest, where she researched Slavic, Jewish and Samizdat collections.

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