Ukrainian and Jewish literatures have long been bound by a shared history and geography, and similarly estranged relationships to empire. The two literary traditions also influenced each other in form and content. In the 1930s, the Soviet Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn published several volumes of his translations of the Ukrainian Romantic Poet, Taras Shevchenko. In this talk, drawn from her recent book,
Songs in Dark Times, Professor Glaser, will discuss the important role of Ukrainian literature to Soviet Yiddish culture.
Where: on Zoom
Price: $18. One third of our ticket sales will go towards Nova Ukraine´s cause in Kharkiv.
Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California — San Diego, where she also directs the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Jewish Studies, programs. Her work lies at the intersection of Russian, Jewish, and Ukrainian literary culture. She has written about the relationship of these three groups in the territory of Ukraine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern UP, 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard U.P., 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford UP, 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020); she is the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (U. Wisconsin Press, 2005). She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, where she is writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry and culture.
