From Lublin to New York and Back: Yankev Glatshteyn and His Peregrinations

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies Admission: Free Registration is required. Register

Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), known in English as Jacob Glatstein, was a sophisticated Yiddish poet experimenting with form and language, as well as a novelist, short story writer, a versatile critic, editor and an important New York intellectual. Born in Lublin, Poland, Glatshteyn spent the first eighteen years of his life there before leaving in 1914, just before the outbreak of WWI, for New York where he, along with other Yiddish poets, established an important literary movement called Introspectivism in English and Inzikhism in Yiddish.

In the summer of 1934, he journeyed to Poland to visit his family and see his dying mother. The result of that visit were two travelogues: Ven Yash iz geforn (1938) and Ven Yash iz gekumen (1940). In these books Glatshteyn combines his reminiscences and reflections from various times, but late 1930s journey and his early years in Lublin, juxtaposed with his American experience are central. Lublin and the surrounding region thus occupy an important place in these books.

Glatshteyn frequently returned to Lublin in his poetry as well. His first collection of poems from 1921 was entitled Yankev Glatshteyn, in agreement with the Inzikhist poetic credo to focus on the self. Forty-five years later, in 1966, Glatshteyn published a collection of poems entitled: A Yid fun Lublin [A Jew from Lublin]. No longer focusing primarily on himself, he becomes a Jew from Lublin, walking the streets of New York, feeling that he is part of the city.

In addition to focusing on the centrality of Lublin in Glatshteyn’s literary universe, new archival discoveries, including information about his post-WWII contacts with Yiddish writers and activists in Poland and his unfulfilled plan to visit the city of his birth in August 1964, thirty years after the first journey, will be explored.

About the Speaker

Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska is Professor of Comparative Literature at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin; in the years 2000-2011 she was the Head of the Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author and editor of several books on Jewish topics in Polish and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology (2001, with Antony Polonsky); Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland 1944-2010 (2014, with Feliks Tych); and Polin 28: Jewish Writing in Poland (2016, with Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Antony Polonsky and Sławomir Żurek). She has translated more than twenty books from English and Yiddish into Polish. In 2004 she received the Jan Karski & Pola Nirenska Award for her research on Yiddish literature and language and in 2016 Irena Sendlerowa Memorial Award. She is the 2025-2026 Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.