Literary Diasporas in Ashkenaz: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures

International conference co-organized by the Middle East and Mediterranean Research Center (CERMOM) at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilization in Paris (Inalco), the Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library (Maison de la culture yiddish – Bibliothèque Medem) and the Department of Jewish Culture at Saint Petersburg State University.
Literary Diasporas in Ashkenaz: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures

Program / Monday, June 13th

Venue: Room 3.05 at Inalco, 65 Rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris 

10:00 Greetings
Masha Itzhaki, Cermom
Yitskhok Niborski, Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library

Keynote lecture

10:30 Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley) A Traveling Homeland

First panel: Theory of Literary Diasporas

11:30 Tal Hever-Chybowski (Paris Yiddish Center/Humboldt University of Berlin) Figures of Diaspora
12:00 Zohar Weiman-Kelman (Ben-Gurion University) Diasporic Temporalities: Irena Klepfisz and Emma Lazarus By the Rivers of Babylon

Second panel: Places of Literary Diasporas

14:30 Efrat Gal-Ed (University of Düsseldorf)
Yiddishland and the First Transnational Yiddish Cultural Congress (Paris, 1937)
15:00 Jan Schwarz (Lund University)
Transnational Ashkenaz in a Yiddish Key: Bashevis’ Work in Globus, 1932–1934

15:30 Madeleine Cohen (University of California, Berkeley)
Here and Now: Do'ikayt in Modernist Yiddish Literature
16:00 Michal Peles-Almagor (University of Chicago)
Two Viennas, One Homeland: (Re-)Writing Jewish Diaspora

Third panel: Politics of Literary Diasporas

17:30 Raphael David Koenig (Harvard University) From Warsaw to Alabama: Internationalist Diasporism in Leyb Malach’s Yiddish Theater Play Misisipi (1935)
18:00 Anna Elena Torres (University of California, Berkeley) “An Avant-Garde of Refugees”: Yiddish Anarchist Views of Diaspora

Visuels_literary_diasporas

Program / Tuesday, June 14th

Venue: Room 3.05 at Inalco, 65 Rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris 
 

Fourth panel: Literary Diasporas in Movement and Immigration

10:30 Sharon Bar-Kochva (Inalco)
Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Novel Blondzhene shtern
11:00 Jack Kugelmass (University of Florida)
Yiddish Writers on the Battlefields of Spain
11:30 Natasha Gordinsky (University of Haifa)
“Adam-Makom”: Gabriel Preil’s Diasporic Condition
12:00 Eli Rosenblatt (University of California, Berkeley)
Diaspora in Reverse: Yiddish Modernism in Southern Africa

Fifth panel: Literary Diasporas in Translation and Reception

14:30 Valentina Fedchenko (Saint Petersburg State University)
Diaspora from Within and From Without in the Late Novels of I. Bashevis Singer
15:00 Elazar Elhanan (The City College of New York)
Non verbum e verbo: Politics of Untranslatability in Hebrew and Yiddish
15:30 Arnaud Bikard (European University at Saint-Petersburg)
Immanuel of Rome's Reception in Yiddish and Hebrew Literatures in the 19th and 20th Century, or How Diaspora Conditioned the Transmission of a Literary Classic

16:00 Agata Grzybowska (University of Warsaw)
Reimagining the Crimean Diaspora: Shaul Tchernichovsky’s Idylls and Their Homeric Origins
17:00 Concluding discussion

Closing event

20:00 The conference will conclude with a festive celebration of a new European Hebrew journal, Mikan Ve’eylakh (which is dedicated to diasporic Hebrew (ed. Tal Hever-Chybowski). The closing event will take place at the Maison de la culture yiddish – Bibliothèque Medem (29, rue du Château-d'Eau 75010 Paris)