Fordham-NYPL Lecture Series: Marat Grinberg, “Stanislaw Lem and his Soviet Interlocutors: Rethinking Science Fiction as Jewish Literature”

The topic of the talk is science fiction produced in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the 1960-1980s in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian as a pivotal missing link in the history of Jewish literature in the 20th century. Not only were many of the science writers and critics Jewish, but science fiction often became the focus of daring explicit Jewishness and widespread subterranean expression in the repressive Soviet atmosphere. In particular, the talk will introduce Stanisla Lem as a Jewish writer and thinker who viewed the fissures of human memory and cosmos through the Jewish lens—biographical, exegetical, historical, and cabbalistic. Lem had an enormous influence on Soviet authors who both emulated and polemicized with him. The talk will explore Jewish critics who provided astute interpretations of his work and engaged with it creatively.

Marat Grinberg immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1993, graduated from the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University in New York City in 1999, and received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago in 2006. He is a scholar of Jewish literature and cinema, Soviet and East European Jewish culture and history, 20th century Russian literature, and the history and poetics of science fiction. Grinberg is currently a professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. A prolific author and public intellectual, among Grinberg’s books are “I Am to Be Read Not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and most recently the widely acclaimed The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). He is the translator and editor of Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine published earlier this year. Marat Grinberg’s essays have appeared in such national venues as Tablet Magazine, Jewish Journal, Mosaic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cineaste. Currently he’s working on a large study of Jewishness and the Holocaust in Russian, Ukrainian, and East European speculative fiction of the Soviet era.