*IN YIDDISH* Mikhail Krutikov, Der kidesh-hashem-motiv in der sovetisher khurbn-literature, 1943-1948
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Himel Family Yiddish Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Al and Malka Green Fund in Yiddish Studies
Israel and Sala Disenhouse Memorial Lecture
Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan)
Der kidesh-hashem-motiv in der sovetisher khurbn-literature, 1943-1948
How “Jewish” was Soviet Yiddish literature? Were commitments to Jewish culture and Soviet ideology mutually exclusive, or could they be creatively fused? Using examples from works of Soviet Yiddish authors written during World War II, this lecture will examine attempts to integrate the theme of Jewish martyrdom during the Holocaust into the Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War.
Mikhail Krutikov is professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Preston R. Tisch professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (Stanford University Press, 2001), From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People (Indiana University Press, 2019). He also co-edited eleven collections on Jewish literature and culture, most recently The Belarusian Shtetl: History and Memory (Indiana University Press, 2023). He writes book reviews for the Yiddish Forward, and a collection of his selected Yiddish essays Tsvish shures (Between Lines) was published in 2019.
This event is conducted entirely in Yiddish
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This event will be delivered in-person in JHB100 (170 St. George Street) on Wednesday, September 18 at 3PM.