MENDELE PERSONAL NOTICES & ANNOUNCEMENTS March 7, 2016
To minimize wear and tear on the untershames, three requests: 1. Send time-sensitive notices well in advance. 2. Send material as plain text to victor.bers at yale.edu as plain text (no HTML, other coding, or attachments) and write MENDELE PERSONALS in the subject line. 3. Correspond directly with the person who or organization which has posted the notice, *not* with your ever-beleaguered untershames. _______________________________________ From:: [email protected] "Who Are the Litvaks? An Illustrated Lecture" with Professor Dovid Katz Monday, April 11, 2016, 6:30 PM PROGRAM LOCATION: Mid-Manhattan Library, 40th St. and 5th Avenue Free and open to the public - first come, first served. Fully accessible to wheelchairs. A major but little-understood tribe of East European Jews, the Litvaks hail from a territory of northeastern Europe that today includes Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, parts of northeast Poland, eastern Ukraine and some snippets of westernmost Russia. Known for their unique dialect of Yiddish and (Ashkenazic) Hebrew, as well as for their alleged stubbornness, love of learning, lack of patience with the presumably unsubstantial, and at times humorlessness and eccentric streak, the Litvak ethos lurks in many of today’s Jewish people internationally. At his New York Public Library talk, Prof. Katz will offer a survey of Litvak history, lore and cultural trends (and wars) from the fourteenth century ranging to predictions about the later twenty-first century. Questions and comments will be most welcome. The speaker promises to devote some (sympathetic) time to non-Litvaks, especially Galitsyáner, too. About the speaker: It would not be easy to find a more qualified (or more Litvak activist) speaker than Professor Dovid Katz. A native of Brooklyn, where he grew up in the home of his late father, Lithuanian Yiddish poet Menke Katz, steeped in Litvakculture, he went on to major in Yiddish linguistics at Columbia University and to found Yiddish Studies at Oxford which he led for eighteen years (1978-1996). When Eastern Europe opened up at the end of the Cold War, he embarked on a new linguistic and cultural atlas of the Litvaks’ homeland, and produced numerous articles, studies, and maps on the people, the language, the culture of the Litvaks. After a “boring” year in New Haven at Yale (1998-1999), he settled in Vilnius, Lithuania to take up a new chair in Yiddish studies at Vilnius University, which he held until 2010. His books include Vilna Jewish Book Stamps (2008), Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009), The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), and the folio volume Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2010), which contains a translation of the Vilna Gaon’s sons’ biography of their father. In the 1990s he published three collections of original Yiddish fiction, mostly set in pre-World War I Jewish Lithuania, which won numerous Yiddish literary awards including the Manger Prize. He is nearing completion of a fourth. In 2015, he began to translate the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish, and has to date completed First and Second Kings and Esther (Ruth and Daniel are in progress). In 2008, when some Lithuanian Holocaust survivors were accused of war crimes in an attempt to rewrite the Holocaust, he became a major Litvak activist combating today’s East European state attempts at revisionism of the history of the Holocaust. He has published dozens of articles and edits the major web journal in the field, Defending History. His personal website is www.dovidkatz.net. -- Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel Librarian Dorot Jewish Division, Room 111 The New York Public Library Stephen A. 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