Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope comes to YIVO: Sutzkever Essential Prose

(New York, NY) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce its upcoming program, Sutzkever Essential Prose, celebrating Zackary Sholem Berger’s new book translating prose by famed Yiddish poet, partisan, and holocaust survivor Avrom Sutzkever. The event takes place on Zoom on Thursday, April 22, 2021, 1:00pm (ET) and will feature translator Zackary Sholem Berger and scholars Miriam Trinh and Karolina Szymaniak, and will be moderated by scholar Justin Cammy.

Berger’s new book, Sutzkever Essential Prose, brings the largely unknown prose of seminal Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever to English readers in new translations. 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 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.

Sutzkever Essential Prose is part of YIVO’s partnership with Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope: Artists in Times of Oppression festival and is co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center.

When:            Thursday, April 22, 2021 | 1:00pm (ET)
Where:          Live on Zoom
Reservations Available at:  yivo.org/Sutzkever-Essential-Prose

For more information contact:
Alex Weiser
Director of Public Programs

THE SPEAKERS

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.

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story