Program | Poems and Translations Part 1 | Poems and Translations Part 2 (pdfs)

The International Women’s Day is an important holiday for us. This year we want to honour the works of women who have been creating Yiddish literature since the Middle Ages.
We will recite works of famous Yiddish women poets, such as Kadya Molodowsky, Celia Dropkin, and Rokhl Korn, as well as less-known authors.

However, we don’t concentrate only on the past! That’s why in the second part you will hear contemporary works of Berlin Yiddishistkes: poetry, music, and translations.

Featuring:

Luise Fakler | Sandra Israel-Niang | Katerina Kuznetsova | Sasha Lurje | Yael Merlini | Rose Mintzer-Sweeney | Maria Stazherova | Ro van Wingerden | Iryna Zrobok

Entrance is free. Donations are welcome.

8 March 2024, 6pm

Art.City.People
Oranienburger Str. 32
10117 Berlin

With Jake Schneider

Yiddish is a queer language. For generations now, Yiddish-speakers have been blending their queerness with their Yiddishness, drawing on this international language’s built-in intersectionality to create theater, music, art, film, and literature that defies old taboos by including our own queer selves. As Sara Felder wrote, “Queer Yiddishkeit gives me permission to go back to the world of my grandparents without leaving myself behind.” The multimedia presentation, a whistle-stop tour through time, will start with the 1907 Berlin premiere of Sholem Asch’s play God of Vengeance, set in a Jewish-run brothel and featuring a lesbian kiss, and enjoy examples from every decade since. You can expect: cruising in 1930s Vilnius, a trans yeshiva boy, a gay bullfighter from Brooklyn, a sapphic bagel baker, a Soviet Yiddish-to-Gay dictionary, queer rabbis, AIDS activism, a ritual spanking on stage, and more.

Jake Schneider is a translator, literary organizer, aspiring Yiddish poet, and proud member of Yiddish.Berlin. He organizes the local Yiddish conversation group “Shmues un Vayn” and gives tours by appointment about the history of Yiddish-speakers in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel neighborhood. jakeschneider.eu

Thursday, 8 December 2022, 8PM
during the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO! [photos]

The presentation will be in English. Most of the Yiddish examples will include English translation.

NOVILLA
Hasselwerder Str. 22
12439 Berlin-Schöneweide

Admission free — Donations welcome

With the kind support of the Partnership for Democracy Schöneweide with funds from the federal program Democracy Live!

With Katerina Kuznetsova and Iryna Zrobok

Yiddish and Ukraine have a long and rich history of literary interconnections. In the event, we will speak about how these connections were realized in translations, both from Ukrainian into Yiddish and from Yiddish into Ukrainian. The first part will include an introductory lecture about Yiddish culture in Ukraine after the October Revolution, the translation politics in the Soviet Union, and translations between the two languages in the 1930s. In the second part, Yiddishist and translator Iryna Zrobok will speak about the Ukrainian publications of Yiddish writers in the last decades and will present her translational project.

Katerina Kuznetsova is a Berlin-based researcher of Yiddish literature and a Yiddish teacher. She has a master’s degree in Yiddish Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was writing about the translations of Sholem Aleykhem’s works.

Iryna Zrobok, originally from Lviv, lives in Berlin since the beginning of the war. She is a translator and Yiddish literature scholar. Iryna works with the “Dukh i litera” Research and Publishing Association that published, among others, translations from Yiddish into Ukrainian and research on Yiddish Studies.

Thursday, 1 December 2022, 7PM
during the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO! [photos]

The event will be held in the English language, with examples of poetry in Yiddish and Ukrainian.

NOVILLA
Hasselwerder Str. 22
12439 Berlin-Schöneweide

Admission free — Donations welcome

With the kind support of the Partnership for Democracy Schöneweide with funds from the federal program Democracy Live!