Firebird

Book Talk Co-sponsored by Poetry in America Admission: Free Registration is required. POSTPONED This program will be rescheduled. Please stay tuned for details.

Zuzanna Ginczanka’s last poem, “Non omnis moriar...” (“Not all of me shall die”), written shortly before her execution by the Nazis in the last months of World War II, is one of the most famous and unsettling texts in modern East European literature. A fiercely ironic last will and testament that names the person who betrayed her to the occupying authorities as a Jew, it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of Polish nationalist myths. Firebird brings together many of Ginczanka’s uncollected poems and presents On Centaurs, her sole published book, in its entirety.

Join YIVO for a discussion of this book with translator Alissa Valles, led by YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers

Alissa Valles is a poet and translator whose recent publications include Hospitium (2019), Jozef Czapski's Memories of Starobielsk: Essays between Art and History (NYRB 2022), and Firebird, a selection of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka (NYRB 2023). Her translations of Miron Białoszewski (with Clare Cavanagh) and Aleksander Wat's Diary Without Vowels and Lumen Obscurum: Poems are forthcoming from NYRB Classics.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.