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Yiddish Choices: Before, During, and After the Holocaust

25 February 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

colour portrait of Anita Norich seated with a bookshelf in the background

In person talk by Anita Norich (Emeritus University of Michigan), an esteemed scholar of Yiddish literature who has published on topics such as the Holocaust in American Yiddish literature, translating Yiddish women writers, Israel Joshua Singer, and more. The UCL venue will be given after you register.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL staff | UCL students | UCL alumni

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Sara Benisaac

Some have argued that it took years—even decades—for writers to take up the subject of the Holocaust. Yiddish writers make it clear that writing about destruction was neither a taboo subject nor one too difficult to address. Yiddish poetry and prose considered the questions raised by the khurbn before it was known as the Holocaust in any other language. How did they confront the impending doom? What were their major concerns during the war? What and how did they go on writing? This talk will consider these and other questions by considering literary works in Yiddish, with a focus on the 1930s and 1940s.

This talk has been supported by a grant from the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.

About the Speaker

Anita Norich

Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at University of Michigan

Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously-untranslated stories by Israel Joshua Singer, and (with Ellen Cassedy) the forthcoming Hand in Hand by Rashel Veprinski. She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th CenturyDiscovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer. She translates Yiddish literature and lectures and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.