Yiddish on the Move: Yiddish Writing and Publishing after the Holocaust

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The destruction of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jewry and its established cultural centers during the Holocaust necessitated a complex reevaluation of the relationship between the perceived former periphery of Yiddish literary capitals, which included Lodz, Warsaw, and Vilnius, and the new, emerging Yiddish centers of Buenos Aires and Montreal. A particularly intriguing case is the literary production on the Soviet territory behind the Iron Curtain. These structural dynamics intricately link the multifaceted roles of writers, editors, translators, and, ultimately, publishers.

Join YIVO for a panel discussion featuring Rachelle Grossman, Matt Johnson, Harriet Murav, and Christin Zühlke, moderated by Erin McGlothlin, as they delve into the elaborate dynamics of Yiddish writing and publishing across transnational literary networks after the Holocaust. They will also discuss the intertwined topics of audience, translations, self-translations, and the profound impact of Holocaust memory and testimony.

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

Rachelle Grossman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a scholar of Yiddish Studies specializing in print and material culture. In her research, she develops a geopolitical approach to literature, focusing especially on the transformation of literary centers and peripheries in the postwar period. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Matt Johnson is Associate Senior Lecturer in Yiddish at Lund University in Sweden. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and subsequently taught at the Ohio State University. His research is broadly comparative, with a focus on Yiddish, German, and English-language literature and cultural history from the 18th century to the present. At Lund, his teaching focuses on the history of Yiddish literature and culture, as well as on topics with a comparative or theoretical focus.

Harriet Murav is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She currently serves as editor of Slavic Review. She is the author of Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia and David Bergelson's Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity. With Gennady Estraikh, she co-edited Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering.

Christin Zühlke is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin. Her Ph.D. project focuses on the Yiddish writings of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau with an approach to Jewish Cultural Studies and Literature. She has worked in several museums and memorials, such as Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany, and Yad Vashem, Israel.

Erin McGlothlin is Professor of German and Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include fictional and non-fictional works of Holocaust literature and film, as well as such topics as the generational discourse on the Holocaust, the narrative structure of Holocaust literature and film, perpetrator representation and perpetrator trauma, and ethical questions related to Holocaust representation. She is the author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021).