Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. 

Why was there no Holocaust in Soviet Russia? There were killings, but the killings did not take on the same meaning as in the West, where the Holocaust emerged as a unique and paradigmatic set of events. Official Soviet history is part of the reason for the absence of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. The term “Holocaust” itself did not have broad currency in the West during the 40s and it was not used in Russian until the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Soviet literature, almost completely neglected by scholars and critics, confronts the impossible history of the destruction of the Jews, but not in the same terms as Holocaust literature in the West.