Symposium on the 70th Anniversary of the Night of Murdered Poets

The first panel will include newest scholarship on the immediate postwar period in the Soviet Union and the Stalinist anti-Jewish purges themselves, leading scholars of Soviet Yiddish culture and the Jewish Cold War (Gennady Estraikh (NYU) and Miriam Schulz (University of Toronto) will also trace exactly the ways in which this event was imbued with meaning in the course of the Jewish Cold War, within the Western Soviet Jewry Movement, and the remnant of post-Stalinist Soviet Yiddish culture in the milieu of the journal Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland).

• Keynote: Gennady Estraikh (NYU, professor of Soviet Yiddish culture and history, director of the Shivdler Project A Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union) will speak about the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Stalinist anti-Jewish purges 1948-1952/3.
• Miriam Schulz (Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow 2021-23, Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies | Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, University of Toronto, was Research Assistant for the Shivdler project A Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union) will speak about the memorialization of the trial during the Cold War and the creation of the Night of the Murdered Poets.
• Followed by a conversation between Estraikh and Schulz about the meanings and legacies in East and West until today.
• Q&A

During the second panel, we will hear from newest scholarship into Soviet Yiddish culture and the Jewish Antifascist Committee conducted within the joint interdisciplinary project The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature that is being conducted in cooperation between the Leibniz Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin and the Professorship for Slavic Jewish Studies at the University of Regensburg. This cooperative project takes the Night of the Murdered Poets as the point of departure and researches Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the 1970s. During our symposium, affiliated scholars will present and discuss the ways in which the trial and assassination of 1952 continues to hold a sway over their research into Soviet Yiddish culture explored against the backdrop of revolution, civil war, and emigration, as well as the experience of Stalinism and the Holocaust and the new insights that are being gained in defiance of well-established narratives. Panelists will present one aspect of the cooperation project and discuss to what extent the 12. August 1952 plays a role in the respective subprojects, how the events are (probably newly) read.

• Sabine Koller (Professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies, University of Regensburg, researcher in charge of the interdisciplinary cooperation project The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature) presents on the life and work of Dovid Bergelson and a new project of translation of his work into German.
• Alexandra Polyan (University of Regensburg, postdoc of the interdisciplinary cooperation project The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature) presents on the life and work of Peretz Markish
• Jakob Stürmann (Dubnow-Institut, postdoc of the project The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature) presents on the Jewish Antifascist Committee.
• Followed by a panel discussion with Miriam Schulz and Gennady Estraikh, mainly about 12. August 1952 and a problematization of the periodization of the project The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature.
• Q&A