Flight, Return, and Emigration: The Wanderings of a Yiddish Writer During and After the Holocaust

July 12, 2021 - July 13, 2021, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Join Dr. David Fishman to follow the journey of the Yiddish poet Chaim Grade. Grade fled his native city of Vilna, known to Jews as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” in late June 1941, as the Germans invaded the city. He spent the next four years as a refugee in the Soviet Union, homeless and malnourished. When Grade returned to Vilna in 1945, he found the city in ruins—and learned from survivors of the Vilna ghetto that his wife, mother, friends, and colleagues had been murdered by the Nazis. He decided that he could not live where the streets were “paved with skulls,” and emigrated across Europe, settling in the United States in 1948.

Grade recounted his life before, during, and immediately after the War in his moving memoir “My Mother’s Sabbath Days” (1953), written in New York. But in a sense, Grade stayed in Vilna for the remainder of his life, dedicating his literary career to the memory of his destroyed Jerusalem. We will follow his journey of exile and redemption through selections from his works.

If you have previously registered for another session in this series, your registration admits you to all sessions in the series, and you may attend as many as you’d like.