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In response to the war in Ukraine, which has deeply shaken us all, we adjusted the focus of our event on International Women’s Day. Many of the Yiddish poets we presented were born or lived in Ukraine. We spoke about their experiences with war, invasion, and displacement and emphasized their connections to Ukraine. We, YIDDISH Berlin, are unanimous in our support for all people living in Ukraine and used this event as an opportunity to raise awareness of Ukraine’s history and culture.

At the event, we also collected donations, which we used to acquire medications for people in need in Ukraine.

The program included recitations of poems and musical renditions of work by the following authors, all of them women:

Marina Alexeeva | Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim | Celia Dropkin |  Irena Klepfisz | Rokhl H. Korn | Anna Margolin | Kadia Molodowsky | Miriam Ulinover | Debora Vogel

The participants included:

Arndt Beck | Patrick Farrell | Hilde Haberland | Sveta Kundish | Katerina Kuznetsova | Anna Rozenfeld | Jordan Lee Schnee | Jake Schneider | Maria Stazherova

Tuesday, 8 March 2022, 6 pm

PANDA platforma
(KulturBrauerei)
Knaackstr. 97
10435 Berlin

Free admission

The event was also livestreamed, thanks to PANDA platforma. You can watch a recording of the event here:

A reader of originals and translations corresponding to the performances can be found here (pdf).

Sponsored by the Ursula Lachnit Fixson Foundation

Like every year, this December is shtetl time. The festival kicks off on 29 November with an online event marking the centennial of Arkady Gentler. And we’ll also be taking part in the SHTETL FEST on 4 December.

On 31 October 2021 at 3 pm, YIDDISH BERLIN held a reading to remember two important Yiddish poets. On 29 October 1937, Moyshe Kulbak and Izi Kharik were summarily executed. They were among the first Yiddish writers to fall victim to Stalinist purges.

Kulbak and Kharik were both born in Belarus – Raysn in Yiddish – where they spent much of their lives and where they were also murdered. The notion of home and finding home, as well as the tensions between the shtetl and the big city, were central themes for both poets.

Although their lives and their literature moved in rather different directions, they share many commonalities beyond the dark day of their death.

YIDDISH BERLIN read prose and poetry by Kulbak and Kharik (in Yiddish) as well as stories about the poets’ lives (in English).

Our event paid tribute to their immense literary legacy while celebrating living Yiddish culture.

Organized and curated by Katerina Kuznetsova

In cooperation with Base Hillel Deutschland

Saving Yiddish Culture in Vilnius

SCREENING

23 January 2020, 8pm

In 1941 the Nazis arrived in the Lithuanian capital. They set about murdering Jewish people and destroying the rich cultural heritage of the city: its many Jewish libraries. A handful of Jewish intellectuals in the Vilnius ghetto bravely resisted by trying to save this heritage. They were called the Paper Brigade. Among them: Avrom Sutzkever.

On the basis of unseen archival material, interviews with protagonist and their descendents as well as historians, this documentary shines a light on an important chapter of spiritual resistance.

Director: Diane Perelsztejn, Belgium, France 2018, 60 min.

Language of the film: German

Admission free – donations welcome!

POETRY | MUSIC | ARTWORK

19 January 2020, 6pm

Sutzkever is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. I do not say this lightly. He is not a philosophical poet; there was no sophisticated philosophy in Jewish culture. Nor is he a descriptive poet; the language of Modernism was opposed to description, and the fictional worlds of Sutzkever’s poetry are presented through evocation and allusion rather than direct statement. But the language of his poetry — the profound sound orchestration and the metaphorical and mythopoeic imagery — is as dense, unmediated, and suggestive as that in the poetry of Mandelstam or Rilke. And his responses to historical reality are as sharp as any in the verse of Brecht. The paradoxical amalgam of these two extremes of twentieth-century poetry — self-focused poetic language and ideological engagement — is successful in Sutzkever’s work because both are presented through the events of the poet’s own biography.

Benjamin Harshav

Sutzkever: Life and Poetry, Intodruction to A. Sutzkever, Selected Prose and Poetry, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1991, p. 3

On the eve of Avrom Sutzkever’s 10th yortsayt we are commemorating him and his work.

Arndt Beck | Irad Ben Isaak | Horst Bernhardt | Patrick Farrell | Charles Green | Hilde Haberland | Sveta Kundish | Ekaterina Kuznetsova | Elisabeth Landenberger | Timothy McKeon | Anna Rozenfeld

Discussion in German, poetry in Yiddish.

Free admission

Accompanying our exhibition farbloyte feder | lekoved avrom sutzkever, we organized a rich program of accompanying events, all at Galerie ZeitZone in Kreuzberg.

You can see photos from the exhibition and events here on the German version of this blog.

17 January, 8pm: OPENING EXHIBITION Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson | Arndt Beck

19 January, 6pm: YIDDISH BERLIN IN HONOUR OF AVROM SUTZKEVER DE | YI

20 January, 7pm: POETRY EVENING Vos iz mer vi lebn? Anna Rozenfeld | Arndt Beck EN | YI

22 January, 8pm: CONCERT Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell

23 January, 8pm: SCREENING The Paper Brigade – Saving Yiddish Culture in Vilnius DE

25 January, 7pm: TRILINGUAL READING Ode tsu der toyb Beck | Bernhardt | Schnee DE | EN | YI

26 January, 8pm: SCREENING of Black Honey – The Life and Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever EN | HE | YI

27 January, 12 noon: CONVERSATION with Hadas Kalderon by Lihi Nagler EN

29 January, 8pm: FINISSAGE | CLOSING PARTY

All events on Facebook