The Department of Russian and Slavic Studies and the Program of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture invite you to two short talks on two 20th-century East European Yiddish poets (the talks will be given in English):
Two Modernist Yiddish Poets – Two Paths out of Eastern Europe
Building the Ratn-Farband: Monumentalizing the Soviet Utopian Project through Yiddish Art and Literature
by Roy Ginsberg (Harvard University)
This talk will present parts of my dissertation research, which examines the manners in which former members of the Kultur-lige and Yiddish avant-garde repurposed Jewish tradition and modernist aesthetics to contribute to and monumentalize the development of an industrialized workers’ utopia in or outside of the Soviet Union. The talk will focus on Peretz Markish and include a rereading of his pogrom poema Di kupe (The Mound), in which I demonstrate how the poet used this work as a foundation from which to transition toward more ideological writing that fell in line with the values of the Comintern. It will conclude with an analysis of Markish’s Der fertsikyeriker man (The Forty-Year-Old Man) as an unrealized contribution to the canon of Comintern literature and an examination of Markish’s vision for the future of proletarian internationalism that made his work unpublishable in the USSR. 
Roy Ginsberg is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersections of Russian and Yiddish modernisms during the early years of the Soviet Union 

The Straw Knight’s Road from Hlyniany to New York: Abo Shtoltsenberg’s Poetical
Autobiography by Dmitri Toperman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
The talk will present the life and works of Abo Shtoltsenberg (1905-1941), who is little known outside the circles of Yiddish literature scholars. Shtoltsenberg spent the first half of his life in his birth town Hlyniany and in  Tarnów, before immigrating to New York where he became a younger member of Di Yunge, the first major literary movement of Yiddish poets in America. At the age of thirty-five he found that he had a terminal cancer, which would prompt him to quickly arrange and publish his only book of poems, simply titled Lider (in Yiddish: Poems). The book was published on the day of his death, becoming a poetical testament to himself, his family and his possible future readers.
Dmitri Toperman (B.Mus., M.A. in Yiddish Studies) is an M.A. student at the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on New Testament translations into Yiddish, translation studies, Jewish-Christian relations and theology.

Monday, December 26 (8th day of Hannukah), 13:00-14:30
Mt. Scopus, Library, Media 32
Light refreshment will be served at 12:45