The Central European University

Jewish Studies Program

cordially invites you to a lecture by

Gennady Estraikh

(New York University)

Yiddish Cultural Life in Post-Stalinist Moscow

Following the full destruction of Jewish cultural institutions in the last years of Stalin’s rule, the Soviet authorities resisted any revival of Yiddish publishing. The change came in 1959, when a Moscow-printed collection of Sholem Aleichem’s stories marked the classic author’s centenary, and then in 1961, when the Soviet Writers’ Union launched the Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland. Although Moscow housed two Yiddish theater troupes, the journal epitomized the Yiddish cultural life of the Soviet capital and, generally, the Soviet Union. Gennady Estraikh, who worked as Managing Editor of the journal, will describe and analyze the Yiddish-speaking intellectual milieu of the final four decades of the Soviet period.

Tuesday, January 17 at 6 p.m.

Gellner Room, Monument Building

Gennady Estraikh is a Professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, where he also directs the Shvidler Project for the History of the Jews of the Soviet Union. His fields of expertise are Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish language and literature, and Soviet Jewish history. His publications include the monographs Soviet Yiddish (1999), In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), and Yiddish literary life in Moscow (in Russian, 2015), and over a dozen co-edited volumes, such as Translating Sholem Aleichem (2012), 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013), Soviet Jews in World War II (2014), and Children and Yiddish Literature (2016).