Figures Beauvoiresques in Exile: Rokhl Korn and Kadia Molodowsky

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free

In this presentation, the North American careers and the works of Yiddish poets Rokhl Korn and Kadia Molodowsky will be considered. After briefly discussing New York and Montreal as plurilingual cities, where immigrant languages forced open a new venue, the manner in which Korn and Molodowsky described their urban milieu and depicted imaginary territories will be discussed. In addition, the way in which they defined themselves as European, contemporary and feminist writers will be examined. This presentation is based on research in the Molodowsky-Korn Archives at YIVO.

About the Speaker

Chantal Ringuet is a scholar, an award-winning poet and a literary translator from Quebec. She has published two collections of poetry, a cultural essay about Yiddish Montreal (À la découverte du Montréal yiddish) and literary translations. She is the editor of Voix yiddish de Montréal, the first anthology of Yiddish literature in Canada in French translation and the co-editor, with Gérard Rabinovitch, of the collective book Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (PUQ, April 2016). In 2015-16, she is YIVO Fellow for a research project about Yiddish Women Writers in North America and Scholar-in-Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.