From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony
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Book Talk
Admission: Free |
After escaping the Vilna Ghetto and surviving winter in the forest among partisan fighters, Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow in 1944. The renowned Yiddish poet turned to memoir to detail his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. In his sobering account, Sutzkever details the Nazi occupation and establishment of the ghetto, daily life in the ghetto, and mass killings at Ponar. He also details armed Jewish resistance, how Jews organized collectively to retain their dignity, and demand for historical justice.
The memoir, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony, was originally published in Yiddish in 1946, and has been translated into English for the first time by professor of Jewish studies and world literatures Justin Cammy. Join Justin Cammy and YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent for a discussion of the great poet’s account of the Holocaust.
About the Participants
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.
Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. An alum of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish and a past recipient of YIVO's Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar fellowship, he is a leading expert on the interwar Yiddish literary group Young Vilna. In 2020 he was a faculty fellow of the Yiddish Matters research project at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, and in 2018 he was the recipient of a Yiddish Book Center translation fellowship. Cammy is the translator from the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem's Judgment of Shomer, Hinde Bergner's On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township, and most recently Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021).