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

Maia 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.

Abraham 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, where lived and wrote Yiddish poetry until his death in 2010.

The film “Black Honey” (now showing at the Tel Aviv Film Festival) is about the poetry and life of poet and partisan, Abraham Sutzkever.

Black Honey tells the incredible story of the greatest Yiddish poet of modern times. The man who led the Paper Brigade underground movement that saved Jewish manuscripts from the Nazis, survived the WWII due to Stalin sending him a private rescue plane, testified in the Nuremberg Trials, and immigrated to Israel in 1947 where he led Yiddish culture, while writing in astonishing vitality. This film is part of a special project, The Hebrews, dedicated to Jewish poets. The project won a Special Mention Award at the Haifa International Film Festival “Between Israeli and Jewish Identity Competition Section”, 2018.