11 April: Third Seder, Shmues un Vayn style (for Yiddish speakers)

Image by Jake Schneider

For more than a year now, our “Shmues un Vayn” (Conversation and Wine) group has been meeting around twice a month at Berlin bars, parks, apartments, bookstores, and courtyards with a very simple concept: to socialize while speaking only Yiddish over a glass of wine or beer. Attendance ranges from six (cozy) to twelve (average) to forty (last summer’s street party). Apart from the occasional board game or impromptu Yiddish singalong, our structure is deliberately loose and open-ended.

One rare moment of structure came last April, a few months after the group’s founding, when member Laura Radosh hosted a “Passover Salon” at her apartment. We read each other Yiddish poems new and old, sang some Ashkenazi Passover classics, and recited together from an old Bundist Haggadah. Without realizing it, we were revisiting a half-forgotten tradition that started in 1910: the “third seder.” In addition to the two ritualized seder evenings that open the festival of Passover, this third one is an open-ended, secular space for reflection, modern interpretation, and creative expression.

This year, during the exhibition celebrating the poet Avrom Nokhm Stencl, we have decided to hold another third seder (deliberately this time) at Galerie Zeitzone, as the twenty-fifth meeting of Shmues un Vayn. Yiddish speakers of all levels are invited to join us and share a song, poem, joke, text, artwork, or other contribution – new or discovered – on the themes of Passover: oppression and liberation. Or simply come, listen, and chat with us in Yiddish. In honor of the holiday, there will be plenty of wine. And while there, you can take a look at the exhibition.

If you have other plans that night, but speak some Yiddish and are interested in attending Shmues un Vayn in the future, email us at nayes [at] yiddish.berlin to receive future invitations. We have also organized satellite gatherings in Tel Aviv and New York and hope to spread the concept to more cities soon.

11 April 2023, 7 pm

Galerie ZeitZone
Adalbertstrasse 79
10997 Berlin

7 April: Opening of the exhibition AVROM NOKHEM STENCL

7 to 12 April 2023 | Rachel Lichtenstein | Manchester Writing School | Manchester Poetry Library and Yiddish.Berlin present:

Stencil with the face of the Yiddish writer Avrom Nokhem Stencl, with descriptions in Yiddish language for an exhibition in Berlin.
A.N. Stencl, stencil: Arndt Beck, design: Alex Kostenko

Avrom Nokhem Stencl (1897—1983)

Yiddish Writer — Poet of Whitechapel — Berlin Bohemian

EXHIBITION | READING | RADIO DOCUMENTARY | FILM

Else Lasker-Schüler called him “Hamid,” Arnold Zweig wrote a foreword for him, and Thomas Mann praised his poetry: Avrom Nokhem Stencl, a Berliner from 1921 to 1936, was one of the most acclaimed modern Yiddish poets in Weimar-era Germany, and he laid the foundations of his multifaceted and prolific poetic work in Berlin. Together with writer and artist Rachel Lichtenstein, the Manchester Writing School, and the Manchester Poetry Library, Yiddish.Berlin is setting the stage for an almost forgotten Berliner.

The exhibition gives an introduction to Stencl’s eventful life and includes multimedia work from Rachel Lichtenstein’s research including artwork, a film and radio programme, which are available in the gallery.

7 April 2023, 8 pm: Exhibition opening with a film screening about Stencl and in conversation with Rachel Lichtenstein
8 April 2023, 8pm: Yiddish.Berlin reads Avrom Nokhem Stencl
9 April 2023, 4 pm: Reading circle (leyenkrayz) open to the public
11 April 2023, 7 pm: “Third Seder,” Shmues un Vayn style (for Yiddish speakers)

8 to 12 April 2023, open daily from 4 to 6 pm, at the events, and by request

Galerie ZeitZone
Adalbertstrasse 79
10997 Berlin

Logo Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester Poetry Library

29 December: H.J. Psotta’s 10th Yortsayt

Ein vertikal geteilter Hintergrund, links weiss, rechts schwarz. Vor dem schwarzen Hintergrund steht ein Mensch mit ausgestrecktem Arm vor dem weißen Hintergrund und auf der Hand sitzt eine Dohle.
H.J. Psotta, about 1975, photo: Aquiles Rösner.

(Slide) lecture with Arndt Beck

It is exactly 10 years since Helmut J. Psotta died largely unnoticed. Arndt Beck remembers an idiosyncratic artist who gathered important experiences of his development in Latin America, gives insights into his own work with the estate and exemplifies some backgrounds and motifs in Psotta’s work.

The exhibition is open from 6 pm — for the last time.

Arndt Beck, works as a freelance artist mainly in photography, drawing and text. As the heir of H.J. Psotta, he represents his work as if it were his own. He has also been working intensively with Yiddish for several years and is one of the initiators of yiddish.berlin.

Thursday, 29 December 2022, 8PM
during the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO! [photos]
open from 6PM.

Presentation in german language.

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!

14 December: New Yiddish Song

Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell, photo: Tanja Katharina Lindner.
Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell, photo: Tanja Katharina Lindner.

Concert with Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell

Opening Concert of “Nisht-keyn-Festival” by SHTETL BERLIN.

For almost a decade, Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell have been developing contemporary Yiddish art song almost effortlessly. Farrell’s compositions breathe with great depth and uniquely plumb the interplay of accordion and song. Together Kundish & Farrell distill and interpret lider from the rich trove of Yiddish poetry.

A response to their recently released debut album as a duo, Nem Mayn Vort:

Kundish & Farrell are bringing an entirely new perspective to the world of Yiddish music with their fierce focus on both text and musical composition, their equal dedication to traditional and contemporary musical practice, and their rare virtuosity as performers. “Nem mayn vort” is a remarkable document of their artistry.

DanZone Records

Sveta Kundish is a singer who performs a wide variety of Jewish music throughout Europe. She appears with Voices of Ashkenaz and Trickster Orchestra among others, and is a regular faculty member at Yiddish Summer Weimar. Born in Ukraine and later moving to Israel, Kundish holds degrees from Tel Aviv University and the Prayner Konservatorium in Vienna, and in 2017 completed a degree in Cantorial Studies from the Abraham Geiger Kolleg in Potsdam, Germany. Kundish currently works as the first female Cantor in the history of the Jewish Communities of Lower Saxony, Germany.

Patrick Farrell is an accordionist, composer and bandleader from Brooklyn, New York. An artist of “sharp wit and blistering speed” (NY Music Daily), he is at home in many different musical styles. Farrell has played as a guest with Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars and Alicia Svigals’ Klezmer Fiddle Express. He is also a composer, musical director, and accompanist for various theater and dance companies.

Wednesday, 14 December 2022, 7PM
during the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO! [photos]

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!

8 December: Queer Yiddish

newspaper on meir arber
The drag performer Délice (aka Meir Arber), Velt-shpigl, Poland, 1931

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!

1 December: Yiddish and Ukraine — A View through the Translation

Talk with Katerina Kuznetsova and Iryna Zrobok

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!

22 November: Ukraine in the works of Sholem Aleichem

Das verschneite Denkmal des jiddischen Schriftstellers Scholem Alejchem in Kyiv
The statue of Sholem Aleichem in Kyiv, Ukraine (c) Oleh Kushch / Wikimedia Commons

Unfortunately, the event is cancelled due to illness.

With Oleksandra Uralova (Kyiv/Berlin)

Within the literatures of Eastern Europe, Sholem Aleichem is one of the most important Jewish writers who wrote in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem deals with the life of Jewish communities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the relationships between Jewish and Christian neighbors, the connection between world history, politics and Jewish everyday life – and all of this is encountered in these texts against the background a Ukrainian landscape.

Born in Pereyaslav in Kyiv region, Sholem Aleichem, the master of “laughing through tears”, has visited many places that can be found on the contemporary map of Ukraine. And so our sarcastic author describes in his works the Ukrainian villages and towns parallel to the shtetln, where in the time of the Russian Empire the Jewish population had to live in the so-called Pale of Settlement.

Oleksandra Uralova is a researcher, writer and Yiddish teacher from Kyiv, who also works in the field of literary translation from Yiddish into Ukrainian. In 2019 she received the Feller Kovba Prize of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies for her translation of Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye, the Milkman”, and in the spring of 2022 her translations of Avrom Sutzkever’s “From the Vilna Ghetto” and “Green Aquarium” were awarded awarded the Sholem-Aleichem State Prize.

Tuesday, 22 November 2022, 7PM
during the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO!

Event mainly in german language.

NOVILLA
Hasselwerder Str. 22
12439 Berlin-Schöneweide

Admission free — Donations welcome

Kindly supported by the Partnership for Democracy Schöneweide with funds from the federal program Demokratie leben!

9 November: Opening of the exhibition MIR ZENEN DO!

Poster der Ausstellung MIR ZENEN DO!
The flyer for Mir Zenen Do, November 2022

From H.J. Psotta’s 85th birthday to the 10th anniversary of his death, moving poets berlin/NOVILLA are exhibiting images from seven decades and releasing Psotta from oblivion. The focus is on his _rosa paraphrases, a cycle that began as part of the collage series Pornography in 1978–79, when Psotta first reproduced a childhood photograph of his mother Rosa. His engagement with this photograph continued in various guises, culminating in his Peruvian drawing cycles from his time with Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-88), where he linked the image of the mother with that of Saint Rosa of Lima, stylizing it into a universal symbol of suffering. This preoccupation lasted almost a decade and this last act alone encompasses more than 100 A3-sized sheets… We are displaying some of them.

Other aspects are offered by the cycle Ode tsu der toyb. In early 2022, Arndt Beck once again took up a theme from the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever by interweaving the photograph of Martha, the very last North American passenger pigeon who died in captivity in 1914, with Sutzkever’s book-length poem. This ode is complemented by Psotta’s earlier works and photographs by Beck, all of which thematically play with the symbol of the pigeon.

In Psotta, we find an artist who added something unique to his time, who waves at us from the beyond with a smile, full of unspent beauty, because he preferred to fly under the radar.

Opening: November 9, 7 pm
Music: Zhenja Oks

NOVILLA
Hasselwerder Str. 22
12439 Berlin-Schöneweide

Opening hours: Wed 6-9 pm | Sat 4-7 pm | Sun 2-5 pm

at all events and by appointment: mobe@movingpoets.org | +49 177 3154530

Not on 24/25 December

***

Further events in cooperation with yiddish.berlin:

November 22, 7 pm: Ukraine in the Works of Scholem Aleichem with Oleksandra Uralova (Facebook event) cancelled due to illness!

December 01, 7 pm: Yiddish and Ukraine – A View through the Translation with Katerina Kuznetsova and Iryna Zrobok (Facebook event)

December 08, 8 pm: Queer Yiddish with Jake Schneider (Facebook event)

December 14, 7 pm: New Yiddish Song with Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell (Facebook event)

December 29, 8 pm: H.J. Psottas Yortsayt with Arndt Beck (Facebook event)

Detailed info coming soon here.

2 November: The Newest Yiddish Poetry

Flyer for reading in Yiddish and English.

Yiddish Berlin presents:
"the newest yiddish poetry"

featuring:
jake schneider
katerina kuznetsova
jordan lee schnee

introduction:
arndt beck

schnapphahn
berlin kreuzberg
dresdener str. 14
november 2, 8PM"

Yiddish.Berlin is thrilled. After years of hard work, three gutsy, talented voices from our own circle are ready to present their own original Yiddish poetry. Be there when Jake Schneider, Katerina Kuznetsova, and Jordan Lee Schnee share their creations with the public for the first time. With an introduction by Arndt Beck.

Counterclockwise from top-right: Arndt Beck, Jake Schneider, Katerina Kuznetsova, Jordan Lee Schnee