Secular voices unsilenced: Yiddish women poets in post-revolution Ukraine

Actions Panel

Secular voices unsilenced: Yiddish women poets in post-revolution Ukraine

Avantgarde Yiddish women poets in Ukraine in the early twentieth century.

By The ACJC Yiddish Seminar Series

Date and time

Starts on Sat, 17 Sep 2022 5:30 PM PDT

Location

Online

About this event

Ukraine became a significant centre for Yiddish literature in the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century was recognised as a leader in Yiddish literary innovation. Ukraine’s Yiddish literary culture was consolidated and strengthened post-Revolution. Minority groups, including Jews, were granted national autonomy and the right to use their native languages in public and in institutional life. State support of ethnic languages and secular cultures led to rapid, unprecedented growth of Yiddish schools, research institutes, publishing houses and cultural institutions intent on fostering a secular post-Revolution Jewish culture. This phenomenal growth took place against a backdrop of virulent antisemitism and violent pogroms.

During this period, a group of avantgarde Yiddish women poets emerged in Ukraine. They produced innovative and daring poems that cast off religious proscriptions and repudiated taboos in traditional Jewish cultural life. Their work was lauded for the remarkable motifs and impulses that they introduced into Yiddish literature. Yet their writing is little known today.

This lecture will present a selection of these poets and poems, contextualising these works within the social, historical, literary and cultural developments of the time.

Header image: poets Shifre Kholodenko and Dina Lipkes.

Hinde Ena Burstin is a Yiddish researcher, teacher, writer and translator. She was lecturer in Yiddish language, literature and culture at Monash University for ten years, during which time she was also coordinator of ACJC’s Jacob Kronhill Program in Yiddish language and culture, and convenor of ACJC’s Yiddish seminar series. She currently teaches international courses in Yiddish language at beginners, intermediate and advanced levels, as well as Yiddish literature courses taught in Yiddish, and Yiddish literature in translation courses taught in English.

Hinde Ena Burstin is a native Yiddish speaker who grew up in a home and community steeped in Yiddish literary culture. Yet, she had not heard of any Yiddish women writers of Ukraine until she discovered them while conducting her own research. Since that time, she has been passionately dedicated to amplifying the voices of these triply-silenced poets.

Organised by

Sales Ended