**IN YIDDISH** Sunny Yudkoff, "Sutzkever's Sibir: Between Text and Image"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The Moyshe and Esther Menachovsky Memorial Fund in Jewish Studies
Sunny Yudkoff (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
"Sutzkever's Sibir: Between Text and Image"
The following lecture and discussion (in Yiddish) take as their subject the complicated publishing history of Avrom Sutzkever’s epic poem Sibir. The work narrates the adventures of an unnamed child in the blue and white landscape of an Edenic Siberia; it is a space where adventures and poetry are born in tandem. The poem was inspired by Sutzkever’s own childhood years spent in the region. First published as “Shtern in shney” in Warsaw in 1937, the text was adapted into a stand-along book published in Jerusalem as Sibir—first in Hebrew (1952) and then Yiddish (1953). Both volumes of Sibir were accompanied by original drawings by Marc Chagall. In this class session, we will navigate the shifting iterations of the poem and consider how the inclusion of Chagall’s illustrations both permits and denies Sutzkever interpretive control over his work.
This event is conducted entirely in Yiddish.
Sunny Yudkoff is associate professor of Yiddish studies in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, as well as the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing, was published with Stanford University Press (2019) and was awarded the AAJR Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies. Her work has appeared in Prooftexts, Comparative Literature, Literature and Medicine, Word & Image, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her second monograph, Against Jewish Humor: Toward a Theory of Yiddish Joy.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Please note that the location of this event has been changed to JHB318!