Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature

Book Talk Co-sponsored by The Tamiment Library at NYU and the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) Admission: Free Watch the video

Spanning the last two centuries, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement.

Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature.

Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Torres about this new book, led by scholar Amelia Glaser.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers

Anna Elena Torres is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Torres co-edited With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Amelia Glaser is a professor of Russian and comparative literature at UC San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Russian literature and film, transnational Jewish literature, the literatures of Ukraine, the literature of immigration to the US, the Russian critical tradition, and translation theory and practice. She is currently writing about poetry in contemporary Ukraine.