Sunday 12 August: 2.00-5.00pm
"From Revolution to Repression"
SOAS, lecture theatre G2, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
An international event held by Five Leaves and the Jewish Music
Institute commemorating 60 years since Stalin executed the cream of
Soviet Yiddish writers and others from the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee.
Gennady Estraikh, Associate Professor at NYU will speak on "Why did
Stalin murder Yiddish writers?", and Robert Chandler, translator of
Life and Fate will speak about Vasily Grossman and Isaak Babel.
Music from the Soviet Jewish world: Polina and Merlin Shepherd.
Admission free, light refreshments provided.
In the early years of the Russian Revolution previously forbidden
literature flourished. Jews in the Soviet Union founded new magazines,
publishing houses and literary movements. In the 1920s they produced
brilliant avant-garde work, written in Yiddish, which sat alongside
the best of European modernism. Later, Yiddish writers had to respond
to the twists and turns of Stalin's rule in their struggle to be
creative, to make a living and, when the purges started, to survive.
Little of this work has been translated into English, despite writers
like David Bergelson, Peretz Markish and David Hofshteyn having a
large readership among Yiddish speakers internationally.
During World War Two the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC)
was set up in the Soviet Union, bringing together scientists, writers,
actors and other intellectuals. In 1948 the JAFC was closed down and
many of its leading activists arrested. After a long period of
imprisonment thirteen members of the JAFC were executed on 12 August
1952, including most of the writers represented in the book.
From Revolution to Repression includes translations of
fiction and poetry, some modernist, some socialist realist, by several
of the writers who were executed or died in prison. The book outlines
the individual and collective history of the authors and gives an
overview of Soviet Yiddish literature. It is published to commemorate
the 60th anniversary of the executions.
The editor and main translator of From Revolution to
Repression was the South African academic Joseph Sherman who taught at
the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He died before the
book was completed. Gennady Estraikh (New York University) contributes
a short memoir of Joseph Sherman.
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