Virtual Tenement Talk – Yiddish in Translation: On the Hunt for Novels by Women with YIVO

Virtual Tenement Talk Co-presented by the Tenement Museum and YIVO Admission: Free Watch the video

In this special virtual Tenement Talk on Youtube Live with the Tenement Museum, we explore the lives of Jewish women in tenements through women’s novels. On the hunt to defy the “urban legend” that women only wrote poems and short stories in Yiddish, but not novels, Professor Anita Norich discovered scores of novels, some of them at the YIVO archive. In this conversation, we’ll focus on these novels and her translations, and how they shed light on tenement life and women’s lives more broadly, including abortions, sex outside of marriage, and how women found and rebuilt homes in the face of revolution, war, economic challenges and misogyny. Dr. Anita Norich will be joined in conversation with Tenement Museum President Dr. Annie Polland.