"Ver vet blaybn?" (Who Will Remain?) — A Documentary About Avrom Sutzkever
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Film Screening & Discussion
Co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center Admission: $15 |
Join YIVO and the Yiddish Book Center for the New York premiere screening of Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?), a film about Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever. The award-winning documentary, a production of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, features Sutzkever's grandaughter, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon, traveling to Lithuania and using Sutzkever's diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust.
Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by the New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust”—whose verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel. Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew, relies on translations of her grandfather’s work, but is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy.
Woven into the documentary are family home videos, newly recorded interviews, and archival recordings including Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trial. Recitation of Sutzkever's poetry and personal reflections on resisting Nazi forces as a partisan fighter reveal how Sutzkever tried to make sense of the Holocaust and its aftermath. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time. A Q&A with filmmakers Emily Felder and Christa Whitney will follow the screening.
This film is in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and English with English subtitles. Running Time: 57 minutes.
Watch the trailer:
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About the Filmmakers
Christa P. Whitney, Producer and Co-Director
Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature at Smith College. She has studied Yiddish language at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Yiddish Book Center. For the past ten years, she has directed the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, traveling near and far recording oral history interviews, managing a video archive, and producing documentary films and web features about all aspects of Yiddish language and culture.
Emily Felder, Editor and Co-Director
Emily Felder is a documentary film editor whose work has been screened in museums, libraries, and schools across the country. She studied anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she became invested in archaeology, visual ethnography, and non-fiction storytelling. She worked as the premiere technical assistant for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, and as an assistant editor at Florentine Films/Hott Productions on feature-length documentaries broadcast on PBS. She is now an editor and videographer based in Los Angeles where she continues to make films.