Shmerke Kaczerginski: Partisan Poet and Collector of Holocaust Songs

Class starts Jan 16 6:00pm-7:30pm

Tuition: $240 | YIVO members: $180**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be accessible in Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website.

Instructor: Malena Chinski

This seminar is addressed to advanced students of Yiddish who are interested in the life and work of the Vilna-born poet, partisan, and survivor-scholar Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954). It will specifically focus on Kaczerginski’s postwar trajectory from Vilna through Lodz and Paris to Buenos Aires, and his research and song collecting activities throughout this period.

We will explore an anthology of texts, which will consist of excerpts of Kaczerginski’s own works, songs from the ghettos and camps collected by Kaczerginski, texts about him, and complementary archival materials drawn from the YIVO Archives.

Through the discussion of these texts and archival materials, this seminar will also aim at improving the students’ Yiddish speaking skills and vocabulary.

Yiddish Level:
This course, conducted in Yiddish, is designed for upper-intermediate and advanced Yiddish students, such as those who took Intermediate III Yiddish (Sunday or Monday), Intermediate IV Yiddish, Intensive Intermediate III&IV Yiddish, Intensive Advanced I&II Yiddish, or Intensive Advanced III&IV Yiddish in the Fall 2023 semester, and all higher level classes.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all required course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Questions? Read our 2024 Winter Yiddish Seminars FAQ.

Malena Chinski is PhD in Social Sciences from the National University of General Sarmiento, in Argentina. Her doctoral dissertation addressed Shoah commemoration within the Jewish community of Buenos Aires during the first postwar decade. She completed a postdoctoral stay in France at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales with support from the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah. Her current research addresses the reconstruction of Yiddish culture in Paris in the immediate postwar period, the itineraries of surviving Yiddish writers and scholars from Eastern Europe, and memories of the Shoah in the Parisian Yiddish press. She has published research articles in various specialized journals and collective volumes and co-edited with Alan Astro the collective volume Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America (Leiden, Brill, 2018).

Malena learned Yiddish at the IWO Foundation of Buenos Aires with professors Ester Szwarc and Avrom Lichtenbaum. She has recently taught beginner and intermediate classes at the University Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and the Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Literature in Berlin. Currently, she teaches regular Yiddish classes in the virtual programs of YIVO and the Maison de la culture yiddish.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.