NaUKMA MA in Jewish Studies Program and Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies invite to a public lecture by Amelia Glaser «Dovid Hofshteyn's Kyiv».
The Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn was one of the core members of the Revolutionary literary “Kiev-grupe” (formed in 1918). In his 1922 book, Troyer, Hofshteyn places the alienated Jewish subject into a hostile Ukrainian landscape. After leaving the Soviet Union for Palestine in the mid-1920s, and returning, he began writing unambiguously patriotic poetry about Soviet Ukraine. Hofshteyn dedicated his 1935 book, Kiev, to Soviet Ukraine’s new capital, which had been moved from Kharkiv a year earlier. Hofshteyn’s changing relationship to Kyiv in particular, and Ukraine more broadly, exemplifies how the multi-national Soviet literary project demanded a new form of “nation thinking” – one that, in addition to privileging space over ethnicity, privileged other Soviet minority cultures over one’s own. Hofshteyn serves as an important case study in understanding the changing relationship between Jews and the territory of Ukraine, one that has continued to affect the cultural identity of Ukraine, even into the 21st century.
Amelia Glaser is associate professor at University of California San Diego. Her research interests include Russian literature (19th and 20th century), modern Yiddish literature, comparative literature, cultural studies, transnational Jewish literature, and the literatures of Ukraine. She is the author of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (Northwestern University Press, 2012). Professor Glaser directs two programs at her school: Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) Program and Jewish Studies Program.
The public lecture will take place on
Tuesday
September 19, 2019
18:00
All guests are requested to be seated by 18:00.
Venue: Office of the NaUKMA Jewish Studies programs (Kyiv, Voloska Street 8/5, building 5, basement).
