The Twentieth Century Told Through Yiddish Poetry

The Twentieth Century Told Through Yiddish Poetry; A Reading of Yoysef Kerler and Avrom Sutzkever by Maia Evrona.

Maia Evrona is an American poet. Her translations of Yoysef Kerler and Avrom Sutzkever have been awarded fellowships from the Yiddish Book Center and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.

She will be reading a selection of her translations of Kerler and Sutzkever, as well as discussing the similarities between the two poets.

The Yiddish poets Yoysef Kerler and Avrom Sutzkever each embodied the Jewish experience of the twentieth century.

Yoysef Kerler was born in Ukraine in 1918, and served in the Red Army during World War II. Though he survived Stalin’s purge of Yiddish writers, he served five years in the Vorkuta Gulag for advocating the teaching of Yiddish. Not long after his release, he would become one of the first prominent refuseniks, before leaving the Soviet Union for Israel in 1973.

Sutzkever was born in 1913 in modern-day Belarus, but fled to Siberia as a child with his family during the First World War. Later, he survived the Holocaust in the Vilna Ghetto, and immigrated illegally to Mandatory Palestine in 1947, just before the founding of the State of Israel.