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Screenings of “Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh”

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

I really thought that I’d blogged about attending a screening of “Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh” last spring, but I’m not finding anything in the blog archive. Which astonishes me, because I have spent so much time thinking (and talking) about that film in all the months since. I also bought Hannah Senesh’s diary, which remains patiently waiting on my nightstand for my close attention.

In any case, I’ve also been thinking about Senesh more recently because a new addition to my to-do list is going downtown to the Museum of Jewish Heritage to see the just-opened exhibition, “Fire in My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh.” Fortunately, I have some time: “Fire in My Heart” runs into August 2011. But I may go earlier–especially if I think I can withstand the emotional intensity of re-watching the documentary I saw last spring–because the MJHNYC is going to offer several free screenings with paid museum admission. Here are the details:

“In conjunction with the new exhibition, Fire in My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh, the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will be offering screenings of Roberta Grossman’s award-winning film Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2008, USA, 85 min.), a documentary about the World War II-era poet, diarist, and resistance fighter. The film, which is narrated by acclaimed actress Joan Allen, is the first documentary feature about Hannah Senesh’s extraordinary life.

The screenings will take place at 11 a.m. and at 1 p.m. on October 31, November 21, 28, and December 19. Tickets are free with Museum admission and can be picked up at the box office on the day of the screening. For more information about the exhibition, please visit www.mjhnyc.org/hannah.”

One more thing: You don’t quite realize how lasting Senesh’s legacy is until you hear Israeli schoolchildren–including children of Ethiopian Jewish descent–singing Eli, Eli at the Leo Baeck Education Center’s school in Haifa. As I did less than three weeks ago.

Call for Essays from “Generation H”

by Erika Dreifus on
2

“‘Generation H’ is seeing submissions for an anthology of writing from 2nd and 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivors. If you grew up in a home where your parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors, we want to hear from you. Even if you don’t consider yourself Jewish.

Seeking humorous, quirky, emotional, unusual, dramatic, creative, unique stories about how survival has affected your life, your decisions, and your relationships as a child or as an adult in a significant way.

All essays should be nonfiction narratives, written in the first-person. Whether narratives delight or disgust the reader, they should have a strong story line. Focus on one or a few selected events; do not send rants or political speeches. Stories should be titled and include your name and be between 1000 – 3000 words, double-spaced, paginated and word-processed in 12 point font. No funky fonts, please. No more than 1 entry per person. Please include a brief bio (1-3 sentences) at the end of your submission.

Deadline: March 20, 2011.

Please send your submissions to: projects(at)slashcoleman(dot)com. Write ‘Generation H’ in the subject bar. Writers chosen for the book will be contacted by May 2011. Pay to be determined.”

(via H-Net.org)

Recent Reads: Grace Schulman’s First Loves and Other Adventures

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Now that I’ve joined Goodreads, I’ve been chronicling most of my “recent reads” over there. Hence, today’s My Machberet post is actually a cross-posting of the write-up I gave earlier this month to Grace Schulman’s First Loves and Other Adventures, a recent release from the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series.

Grace Schulman has to be one of the most generous writers out there. I had the privilege of meeting her for a profile I wrote not too long after I began working at The City University of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor at Baruch College. I left our first meeting with an armful of books, and when we met again a few months back, she asked if she might send me her latest: First Loves and Other Adventures.

I probably can’t be completely unbiased, but having had the opportunity to get to know this author a bit, I find the opening and closing essays in this collection most striking. They are also, arguably, the most personal.

In the first, “Helen,” Schulman describes family history, the experience of growing up Jewish in New York while the Holocaust unfolded across the ocean, and the connections she sensed from an early age with her father’s sister, Helena (“my parents Anglicized it”), who died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. The closing piece, “An Uncommon Friend,” recounts the relationship Schulman and her husband had with author Richard Yates. I was in the room at the 2008 conference in New York where Schulman presented this text on a panel honoring Yates’s life and work; I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit it.

In the introduction to this volume, Schulman describes the essays within as being “of two kinds: first, about becoming a writer; second, about some of the books I love.” The book encompasses reflections on May Swenson, Marianne Moore, Octavio Paz, and others. And anything Schulman writes is worth reading. Still, the first and last essays are the ones I’ll remember the longest.

Translated Poetry by Avrom Sutzkever in Hayden’s Ferry Review

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

The current issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, a literary journal from Arizona State University, features poetry by Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), introduced and translated by Miri Koral. And luckily for us, this material is available online.

As Koral writes:

“The Yiddish poet and writer Avrom Sutzkever is considered to be the greatest Yiddish poet of modern times, and the greatest post-War Jewish poet. He was born in the town of Smorgon, Lithuania in 1913, near the city of Vilnius (Vilna). Vilna, the venerable center of a great flowering of Jewish cultural and intellectual life, became his enduring spiritual and creative home. Already prior to WW II, he enjoyed a well-established reputation as a member of the literary group Yung Vilna (Young Vilna).

The body of work that he then produced under hellish circumstances in the Vilna Ghetto is both rigorous lyrical poetry as well as a magnificent artistic witnessing of the systematic destruction of Jewish Vilna. During this period, at risk of death, he was instrumental in rescuing many rare Jewish books and manuscripts that were otherwise destined for nefarious ends by the Nazis. In 1943 he escaped to the partisans and then to Moscow, subsequently serving as a witness at the Nuremberg trials.

In 1947, he emigrated to Israel, where he continued his efforts to safeguard what remained of Yiddish language and culture. He founded the literary group of Yiddish writers, Yung Yisroel (Young Israel), as well as Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), the leading Yiddish literary journal, which he edited from 1949 to 1995. Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize in 1985, the only Yiddish poet to have received this honor. His good friend Marc Chagall was also an illustrator of Sutzkever’s poetry.

In addition to undertaking to memorialize through his oeuvre both the glories and devastations of Jewish Vilna, his many published works address a wide array of themes, including life in Israel, metaphysical and artistic inquiries, and lyrical celebrations of the natural world.

Sutzkever’s poetry in general is a challenge to translate well because of its often extraordinary musicality (sounds and cadences) and multifaceted concepts dealing with spirituality, creativity, and the ephemerality of human experience. He also is known for enriching the language of his poems with words that he coined and with those no longer in use from Old Yiddish. In other words, much of this uniqueness inherent in the original cannot help but be lost in translation. In spite of these translating challenges, English translations of Sutzkever’s poetry can be found in numerous anthologies, collected works, and in The New Yorker.

The two Sutzkever poems translated here were written in the Vilna Ghetto and have the challenge less of complex language than of keeping some of the rhythm and rhyme of the original while adhering as much as possible to the poems’ exact wording and compact power in depicting acts of spiritual resistance in inhumane situations.”

To read the two poems, “A Little Flower” and “Scorched Pearls,” please click here.

Learning Something New (Almost) Every Day

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“Jewdayo,” maintained by Jewish Currents magazine, provides a daily dose of Jewish history. Sometimes, I’m familiar with the history that’s presented there. But quite often, I find myself learning something that’s at least partially, if not altogether, new to me.

Such was the case when I saw today’s post on the Lubeck Harbor Tragedy, which took place on May 3, 1945:

On this date in 1945, more than 7,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps were killed by Britain’s Royal Air Force in Lubeck harbor, Germany, in a tragic case of “friendly fire.” Almost 10,000 Jews, Russian POWS, and other “enemies of the Reich” had been marched by the Germans from several concentration camps to the German Baltic coast and crowded onto three ships, which were probably scheduled to be deliberately sunk. Instead, in the course of two hours of bombing and strafing, British planes, under orders to “destroy the concentration of enemy shipping in Lubeck Bay,” killed all but a few hundred of the survivors. The incident, which took place just a day before the British accepted the surrender of all German forces in the area, was hardly acknowledged and never memorialized, and RAF records about the disaster were sealed until 2045.

I never knew. Did you?