The Destruction of “Our” Vilne: Avrom Sutzkever’s Ghetto Poetry and Chaim Grade’s Poetry of Exile

The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Studies

Avrom Sutzkever and Chaim Grade both lived and wrote before, during and after the Holocaust; belonged to and were shaped by pre-war Jewish Vilna and its intellectual landscape; and lost their homes during the Holocaust. But after the German invasion of Vilna in 1941, their paths diverged: while Grade succeeded in fleeing eastwards, Sutzkever was forced into the ghetto. Miriam Trinh presents the two writers’ reactions to the Holocaust from the twin Jewish perspectives of ghetto and exile.

About the Speaker

Miriam Trinh was born in Poland, grew up in Germany and immigrated to Israel at the age of 19. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Yiddish at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, obtained her Master's degree in Yiddish literature at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Strasbourg in France and her Ph.D. at Hebrew University. She has taught Yiddish language and literature at the Maison de la Culture Yiddish (Paris), OCHJS (Oxford), Tel Aviv University and Beys-Sholem-Aleykhem (Tel Aviv). She is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Her fields of research are Yiddish literature during the Holocaust and the multilingual Jewish literary reaction in Europe to the rise of Nazism. She is this year's recipient of the Choseed-Racolin Fellowship at YIVO, where she also works as the main archivist for the Chaim Grade archive.