Sutzkever Essential Prose
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Book Talk
In Partnership with Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope: Artists in Times of Oppression Co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center Admission: Free |
Sutzkever Essential Prose brings the largely unknown prose of seminal Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever to English readers in new translations by Zackary Sholem Berger. In these works, Sutzkever blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and poetry; between real and imagined; between memory and metaphor. He offers haunting scenes drawn from a vast imagination and from the unique life he lived—his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his trauma as a partisan fighter and a survivor of the Holocaust, and his post-war life as a Yiddish poet in Israel. Join us for a conversation celebrating this new book with translator Zachary Sholem Berger and scholars Miriam Trinh and Karolina Szymaniak, moderated by Justin Cammy.
About the Participants
Zackary Sholem Berger is a poet and translator working in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. His work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Yiddish Forward, and Asymptote and elsewhere. Themes of his verse range from the philosophical and medical to the immediate problems of his adopted city Baltimore. In the Yiddish world he might be best known as a regular contributor to the Forverts and the translator of Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat (as well as other Seuss creations) into Yiddish.
Dr. Miriam Trinh is a professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at Hebrew University. Co-founder of “Yo”-Yidish-Ort, a center for Yiddish language and culture in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, Trinh is a noted Yiddish educator including at many international summer courses around the world.
Justin Cammy is chair and associate professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College, and senior fellow of the Goldreich Institute for Yiddish at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of the introduction to The Full Pomegranate, a recent volume of Sutzkever poetry translated by Richard Fein. Cammy's own translation of Sutzkever's memoir Vilna Ghetto will appear with McGill-Queens University Press in 2021.
Karolina Szymaniak is assistant professor at the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wrocław and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute. Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, and translation studies. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the POLIN Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Łódz. Her recent publications include Montages. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City and My wild goat. Anthology of women Yiddish poets (in Polish). She is also the editor of Rachel Auerbach's ghetto writings, which received the 2016 Polityka History Award.