Lecture: Stalinist Repressions against Ukraine's Yiddish Writers: Reasons and Legends

Lecturer: Gennady Estraikh (New York University)

Organised by:  University of Regensburg, Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies and the Center for Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies “Think Space Ukraine”, funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA)

Language: English

The lecture is part of the Colloquium for Slavic Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg. Learn more

Abstract

In the 1930s-1950s, scores of Yiddish writers lost freedom or life, and few of the survivors had a chance to write and publish memoirs about their time in the prisons and GULAG. During the Soviet period, scholars usually had no access to the secret police files related to the years of the Stalinist repression. The situation had changed following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Archives in Ukraine are particularly forthcoming with materials on various aspects of history. As a result, historians of Soviet Yiddish literature (and of many other disciplines) can work with sources that shed light on how the machinery of repression worked in the 1930s-1950s. 

The presentation will focus on the fabricated charges against the arrested writers and how they differed from what the relatives, friends and historians previously considered to be the motives for the prosecutions. A spoiler: the prosecution usually had little if anything to do with the writer’s oeuvre. 

Gennady Estraikh

Gennady Estraikh is an emeritus professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. He was born and grew up in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and lived in Moscow in 1976 to 1991, where he and his wife unsuccessfully applied for emigration in 1979. From 1988 to 1991, he worked as Managing Editor of the Moscow Yiddish journal Sovetish Heymland, and later settled in England, studying for a doctoral degree at the University of Oxford and then working at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and, in London, at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Soviet Jewish history and intellectual life in Yiddish literary and journalistic communities are the main fields of his interest. His books include Soviet Yiddish (1999), In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), Yiddish in Ukraine (in Ukrainian, 2016), Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, 1953–1967 (2022), The History of Birobidzhan (2023), and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine (2024).

Photo - Elena Estraikh