Oksana Shcherba

Oksana Shcherba is an independent researcher and Yiddish translator from Kyiv, Ukraine. She received an MA from the University of Haifa in the Weiss Livnat Program in Holocaust Studies. Her BA degree is in the Cultural Studies at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine).

In recent years, Oksana has been working as a translator from English and Yiddish languages, and has translated several Yiddish authors into Ukrainian (Mendel Osherovich, S.Ansky, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer). Her article on S.Anski’s “The Jewish Destruction in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina, from a 1914-1917 Diary” was recently published in peer-reviewed journal in Jewish Studies ‘Judaica Ukrainica’ Vol.9 2020.

Among the most valuable experiences, she names studying and translating 17 Jewish folk songs of the ghetto dwellers and prisoners of the labor camps in Transnistria, collected in years 1944-1945, from Yiddish into Ukrainian for the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. This research demanded emerging into studies of Jewish folklore, as well as knowledge of religious tradition and Holocaust history.

During her stay at Stanford, Oksana worked closely with Jewish Studies faculty as she researched Jewish modernist writers, such as Moyshe Kulbak, Aaron Zeitlin, and Bruno Schultz. She investigated the influence of the Jewish mystical tradition on the development of their artistic language, discovering textual traces which led to their connection with the Jewish tradition.