Language and Plasticity in Debora Vogel’s Poetics

Max Weinreich Center Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Literature The Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship Admission: Free Get tickets

Debora Vogel (1900-1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, philosopher, art critic, and translator. She was a “wandering star” of Polish and Yiddish Modernisms in Eastern Europe and North America. This talk will examine Vogel's contributions to the Yiddish press in New York and Galicia, namely the In Zikh journal of the Introspectivist movement, and Tsushtayer journal in Lemberg. Tsushtayer was the main publication venue for literature and art in this center of Yiddish cultural production in the then Poland. This journal connected both Eastern European writers and American Yiddish writers who represented different movements and groups, under the banner of international Yiddishism. The figure of Debora Vogel will serve as a bridge to widen our understanding of the networks of Yiddish intellectuals worldwide, and their contributions to Yiddish culture at large, and Yiddish modernism in particular.

About the Speaker

Anastasiya Lyubas is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature in Binghamton University, where she is currently at work on her dissertation “Language and Plasticity in Debora Vogel’s Poetics.” Lyubas is a 2017-2018 translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and a Max Weinreich research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Her translations of Debora Vogel’s prose appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Pakn Treger, and were accepted for publication in K1N, The Odessa Review, and Lunch Ticket. Lyubas is working on a full collection of Debora Vogel’s essays, reviews, polemics, and correspondence, which she translated from Yiddish and Polish into Ukrainian, to be published by Dukh I Litera publishing house in Kyiv, Ukraine.