Czernowitz in Jewish Memory
Monday, March 8, 2010 at 6:30pm
The city of Czernowitz – known both as “Vienna of the East” and as "Jerusalem on the Pruth" – is the site of two different powerful memories. Situated at the crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe, between Hasidism, Jewish orthodoxy and secularism, it was, for some, the center of a large and highly assimilated Austro-German Jewish way of life, the home of some of the most celebrated German-language writers of the twentieth century. The poets Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer were among these. For others, it was a hub for the creation of the modern Yiddish language and its literary and political culture, with poets like Eliezer Steinbarg, Itzig Manger, and the recently deceased Josef Burg. In 1908 Czernowitz was the site of the first international conference on the Yiddish language.
Czernowitz, capital of the Habsburg province Bukowina, later annexed by Romania and presently situated in Ukraine, is a city affected by some of the grand narratives of the European 20th century: by the encounter between fascism and communism; the intensification of modern anti-Semitism; the lure of Zionism and modern Yiddishism; the displacement of refugees; and the shadow of Holocaust devastation. Its rich, multifaceted history has remained alive in the stories and memories of its survivors and their offspring.
A distinguished panel of historians and writers will discuss the legacy of this major Eastern European urban center of Jewish cultural life, and illuminate facets of Jewish identity in urban Jewish communities within the broader history of Jewish emancipation, assimilation and resistance in East and Central Europe.
 The program is inspired by the recently released volume Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, University of California Press. Authors, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer will be joined by Susannah Heschel, important scholar of modern Judaism with family ties to Rabbinic dynasties from the Czernowitz region; Norman Manea, Romanian writer born in Bukowina, and professor of European studies; and Boris Sandler, editor of the Yiddish Forverts and author and producer of a new documentary film 'Glimpses of Yiddish Czernowitz.’ The film will be shown in its entirety as part of the program. Historian Atina Grossman will moderate the panel.
The program is sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, Leo Baeck Institute, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Consulate General of Romania.
Ticket Info
$15 General Admission; $10 CJH, LBI, YIVO members; $5 Students.
For all reservations and inquiries, please call SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or visit www.smarttix.com.
Speaker Bios
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches Modern German and European History, and Gender Studies, and a Seminar Associate at the Remarque Center for European Studies at New York University. A graduate of the City College of New York (BA) and Rutgers University (Ph.D), she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, German Marshall Fund, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2008-2009 she was a Guest Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, holding the Walter Benjamin Chair in German Jewish History and Culture. Her publications include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995,97), Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (co-editor with Bartov and Nolan, 2001), and When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (co-editor with Renate Bridenthal and Marion Kaplan, 1984). Her most recent book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany was published by Princeton University Press in 2007 and received the George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. She is currently working on transnational routes of relief and rescue for European Jews during WWII with a special emphasis on Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India.
Susannah Heschel holds the Eli Black Professorship in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Prof. Heschel is currently on sabbatical from Dartmouth for two years, thanks to a Scholar’s Grant from the Carnegie Foundation, and is writing a book on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam. She is currently in residence at the Humanities Center at Tufts University.
Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Most recently, together with Leo Spitzer, she published Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Among her many other publications, she is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (1999), a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory" (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004). She has also published numerous articles on cultural memory, visuality and gender, particularly on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust in literature, testimony and photography.
Norman Manea is Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture; and Writer in Residence at Bard College. He received his M.S. from the Institute of Construction, Bucharest, Romania. He is the auuthor of novels, volumes of short fiction, and essays. Available in English: The Hooligan's Return (memoir, 2004); The Black Envelope (novel, 1995); Compulsory Happiness (novellas, 1993); October Eight O’Clock (short fiction, 1992); On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (essays, 1992). Awards and honors: DAAD Berliner Kunstler Programm (1987), Fulbright Fellowship (1989), MacArthur Fellowship Award (1992), Guggenheim Fellowship (1992), National Jewish Book Award (1993), The New York Public Library Literary Lion Medal (1993), Nonino International Prize (2001), Napoli Prize for Fiction (2004), Prix Médicis étranger (2006). Member, Berlin Academy of Art (2006). (1989– )
Boris Sandler was born in 1950 in Belz (Bessarabia). In 1975 he graduated from the Kishinev Music Conservatory. He played violin in the Moldovian Symphony Orchestra and in 1983 received an advanced degree in Yiddish Prose Writing, Editing & Literature from the Gorky Literary Academy in Moscow. Sandler began writing for the Moscow Yiddish magazine scow Sovyetish Heymland and soon joined their editorial board. In 1989 he created a Yiddish television program on Moldovan State Television called "On the Jewish Street.” His is the author of two documentary film scripts: "Yiddish! Don't give up " (1991) and "Where is my home?" (1992), which dealt with the fate of Bessarabian Jewry. From 1990 until he immigrated to Israel in 1992, he was the Yiddish Editor of the bilingual journal Undzer Kol ("Our Voice") in Kishinev. From 1989-1992 he was the President of the Yiddish Cultural Organization of Moldova. In 2010, Sandler published a book of Yiddish poetry entitled ‘In Klangenets Fun Netsakh’ (Israel, 2010). Sandler is the author of eight works of fiction and an illustrated book of Yiddish children’s poems. He was the Editor of Kind un Keyt, a Yiddish children's magazine. His works have been translated into Russian, English, French, German, Hebrew and Rumanian. Sandler was also the recipient of a number of prestigious Israeli literary awards. Since April 1998 he is Editor-in-Chief of the Yiddish Forverts, and since 1999 he is Editor of the Forward radio show.
Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and the Brownstone Professor of Jewish Studies (2010) at Dartmouth College. He was also Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University (2005-09). Besides Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, his recent books include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang 1998), Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge 1990, Hill & Wang 1999) and the co-edited Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE 1999). He has also written numerous articles on Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its generational transmission.
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Nashville 3/17
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer conjure the Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory
3/17/2010
7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Location:
Sherith Israel Synagogue (3600 West End Avenue @ Bowling Ave.)
Category:
Open to the Public
In their just-published history and memoir, Ghosts of Home (University of California Press) Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and her husband Leo Spitzer, the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College, tell the story of Czernowitz, an invisible city that used to exist in what is today the Ukraine. Called "the Vienna of the East," Czernowitz was a vibrant center of Jewish-German Eastern European culture that flourished under the Habsburg Empire until it was all but wiped out in World War II. The city lives on, however, not only in the memories of those inhabitants who were able to escape the Holocaust but also, fascinatingly, in the memories of their children who have received tales of Czernowitz ìlike a precious and haunted heirloom. Hirsch's parents were themselves "Czernowitzer" who escaped the oppressive regimes of the Nazis, the Romanians and the Russians. Accompanied by their daughter and son-in-law, they traveled to Chernivtsi, as the city is now called, in 1998. Hirsch and Spitzer intersperse a historical narrative with accounts of this and three subsequent trips Hirsch and Spitzer made to the Ukraine to create a moving account of the persistence of this city in a communal memory that crosses generations.
Co-sponsored by VU Program in Jewish Studies. For additional information, please contact Lynne Perler @ (615) 322-5029.
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April 8, 6-8
"Where People and Books Used to Live:
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Paul Celan, and the Space of Czernowitz"
A Panel Discussion with
Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature, and IRWaG
Florence Heymann, Centre de Recherche Français de Jerusalem
Stanley Corngold, Princeton University, Comp Lit and German
Irene Silverblatt, Duke University, Anthropology
Introduction by Neni Panourgia, Columbia University, Anthropology
Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, 420 West 116th Street, New York, NY 10027, Tel: 212-854-1858
Organized by Columbia University's
Anthropology Dept Scheps Library Series
Co-sponsored by
The Society of Fellows, Dept of Germanic Languages, ICLS, Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, IRWaG, The Harriman Institute, The European Institute , The East Central European Center
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Vortrag und Diskussion mit Marianne Hirsch und Leo Spitzer
Moderation: Annegret Pelz (Institut für Germanistik)
Begrüßung: Christoph Augustynowicz
Donnerstag, 24. Juni 2010, 18 Uhr
NIG, Hörsaal II (Erdgeschoss), Universitätsstr. 7
Marianne Hirsch/Leo Spitzer (2010): Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, eine Familien- und Lokalgeschichte über die Stadt Czernowitz, in der die Eltern von Marianne Hirsch aufwuchsen und den Holocaust überlebten.
Eine Veranstaltung des Doktoratskollegs „Das österreichische Galizien und sein multikulturelles Erbe“
Unterstützt vom Bruno Kreisky Forum, dem Institut für Kulturwissenschaften und Theatergeschichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, der Österreichischen Exilbibliothek im Literaturhaus in Wien und dem Verein Gedenkdienst
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