Polly Zavadivker, PhD completed her degree in the summer of 2013. Her dissertation compares representations of catastrophic war in the writings of Russian and Soviet Jews both prior to and during the Holocaust. Using Russian and Yiddish sources, Ms. Zavadivker focuses on the work of Soviet Jewish author Vasily Grossman, with the goal to show how Grossman’s work relates to earlier descriptions of crisis in Jewish history, specifically in the writings of S. An-sky and Simon Dubnov (during World War I) and Isaac Babel (during the Polish-Soviet War). Each of the figures examined in her dissertation chronicled the experiences of and constructed narratives about Jewish civilians in the borderlands that are now located between Ukraine and Poland.
Ms. Zavadivker has articles based on her dissertation forthcoming in The Journal of European Studies and the Simon Dubnov Institute Yearbook. Her dissertation advisors at the University of California Santa Cruz are Nathaniel Deutsch, Murray Baumgarten and Peter Kenez. Dr. Zavadivker is the Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware where she teaches Russian History, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust for the History and Jewish Studies Departments.