with Shiri Shapira, in conversation with Jake Schneider
A mixture of readings in Yiddish and discussion in English
“The future? I rolled my eyes. Who said anything about a future? The future is over already.”
SHIRI SHAPIRA’s ambitious debut collection of short stories, autofiction, and memoir, titled DI TSUKUNFT (The Future, H. Leivik-Farlag, 2026) contrasts the sweep of history and the relentless news cycle with the banal apathy of her characters’ day-to-day lives, even as current events shape them all the time. This cynically comical book marks a new generation of narrative prose in Yiddish, a diasporic language that refuses to die.
The event will combine short readings from Shapira’s book in Yiddish with discussions in English about time and literature. What happens when the narrative time of a short story is interrupted by the geological time of an earthquake? Are reading and writing forms of time travel? Does journalism spark empathy or apathy? And who said anything about a future?
Hosted by Yiddish.Berlin
18 July 2026, 2pm
SaliGari Bar
Simplonstraße 23
10245 Berlin-Friedrichshain
Signed copies of the book will be available for sale.
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Quotes in English translation
“The year 2001 was very long. By the beginning of the year, my classmates and I had entirely forgotten the word ‘millennium.’ I first came across the word myself in a special issue of a teen magazine with a silvery cover. That was back in 1999, and the glossy pages and foreign words made a strong impression on me. The word ‘millennium’ portended an unknown future, but a positive one: prestigious, superhuman, or simply silvery.”
“I finished my degree and told the professor he would need to find a new assistant soon. I’d already finished cataloguing the last few decades of [the Yiddish literary journal] The Future and had started cataloguing Time, a daily newspaper from the US that could only be accessed on microfilm. […] The Future no longer comes out anymore, not since 2010, and Time was very short-lived.”
“Benny and Dalia, like the Levkovitches of every generation, never thought the news would have anything to do with them. Their relationship with time and history was always from the sidelines, in multiple senses: they knew that they were on the safe borderline between the very weakest, who were trampled to death under boots for their insignificance, and the most distinguished, who are often murdered for their influence.”
“In 2021, the same year as the fateful climate-change conference in Glasgow; the same year when magazines printed obituaries for Nobel laureates, actors, philanthropists, and cellists; the same year when the headquarters of Israeli radio and television was bulldozed in Jerusalem; and the same year when Italy won the Eurovision Song Contest in the Netherlands—that year, in Holon, a baby was born, a little girl, Lolita.”
