Cultural Networking in the Aftermath of Destruction: Itineraries and Correspondence of Szmerke Kaczerginski, 1944-1954

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Baltic Jewish Studies The Abram and Fannie Gottlieb Immerman and Abraham Nathan and Bertha Daskal Weinstein Memorial Fellowship in Eastern European Jewish Studies, the Abraham and Rachela Melezin Memorial Fellowship and the Maria Salit-Gitelson Tell Memorial Fellowship Admission: Free

Szmerke Kaczerginski’s several transitions across the globe throughout the last decade of his life (1944-1954)—including his initiative to establish the Vilna Museum of Jewish Art and Culture during his time in that city after liberation (1944-1945), his work for the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Łódz (1945), his later integration into the cultural circle of refugees gathered at the rue Guy Patin cultural center in Paris (1945-1950), in which period he toured seventeen DP camps in the American zone of occupied Germany (1947), and his final settlement in Buenos Aires as a member of the local branch of the Yidisher Kultur Kongres (1950-1954)—eloquently show how Kaczerginski became an itinerant survivor and cultural entrepreneur.

In every place where Kaczerginski temporarily settled, he never ceased to travel and to initiate collective projects, in an effort to reduce the spiritual distance between Yiddish centers throughout the world. Epistolary contact was a main means whereby he undertook this life enterprise of inter-connecting the multi-centered Yiddish-speaking Jewish Diaspora and creating lasting cultural networks. Indeed, correspondence in Yiddish remains one of the most important sources for the study of the early post-Holocaust period, since it reveals contacts that persisted after the dispersion and destruction of East European Jewry, and the process of construction of new networks. This lecture will focus on particular moments of Szmerke Kaczerginski’s postwar itineraries by pointing to the letters that he wrote throughout his wanderings.

About the Speaker

Malena Chinski, Ph.D. (Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2017), is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Council for Technical and Scientific Research (CONICET). Her doctoral dissertation focused on early commemoration of the Shoah within the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. She has also written on Yiddish book publishing in Buenos Aires and family correspondence in Yiddish, and has co-edited with Alan Astro (Trinity University) the academic anthology Splendor, Decline and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, to be published by Brill in 2018.