Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance in Soviet Ukraine
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine gives a broad view on Soviet Jewish literary life, and on the repression suffered by Yiddish writers under Stalinist rule. It moves from the paradigm of writing almost exclusively about the most prominent authors, whose execution in Moscow on August 12, 1952 is tragically known as "The Night of Murdered Poets." Instead, the narrative is built as a group biography of five writers whose literary home was in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1934 to 1991. Those authors are as follows: Avrom Abchuk (arrested and executed in 1937), Chaim Gildin (arrested in 1940; died in a camp in 1943), Itsik Kipnis (arrested in 1949; released in 1955), Rive Balyasne (arrested in 1952; released in 1955), and Hirsh Bloshteyn, an enthusiastic agent of the secret police. In addition, this book is populated by other Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian literati. Kyiv was the primary fountainhead for Yiddish literary creativity in the early postrevolutionary period for seven decades and remained a leading Soviet Yiddish literary center, second in importance only to Moscow. Author Gennady Estraikh pays special attention to the victims’ rehabilitation, posthumous or otherwise, in the mid-1950s and onwards.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Estraikh about this book, led by Mikhail Krutikov.
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
Born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Gennady Estraikh later lived in Moscow, where he turned to writing in Yiddish and worked as Managing Editor of the Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland) from 1988 to 1991. In 1991-2002, he lived in England, where he worked at the Oxford-based Institute of Yiddish Studies and the London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. In 1996, he received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. His fields of expertise are Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish language and literature, and Soviet Jewish history. His publications include Intensive Yiddish (Oxford, 1996), Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford, 1999), In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse University Press, 2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (Oxford: Legenda, 2008), Yiddish Literary Life in Moscow, 1917-1991 (St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2016, in Russian), Yiddish Culture in Ukraine (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016, in Ukrainian), Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Boston, 2020), fifteen co-edited scholarly volumes, and several books in Yiddish.
Mikhail Krutikov is currently working on a study of the Soviet Yiddish author Der Nister, A Witness to the People: Der Nister and Soviet Yiddish Literature under Stalin, 1929-1949. His other research projects explore literary representations of the urban spaces of Kiev, Vilnius, and New York in Jewish writing in Yiddish, Russian, and English. He is a series editor of "Jews in Eastern Europe" at Indiana University Press, associate editor of Prooftexts, a member of the Editorial Board of East European Jewish Affairs, as well as a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He also writes a weekly column on culture for Yiddish Forward. Krutikov holds a joint appointment in both the Slavic Department and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at University of Michigan.