Khrystyna’s Semeryn lecture “Holocaust Women’s Experience in Ukrainian Jewish Poetry”

We kindly invite you to visit a lecture of Khrystyna Semeryn on October 20, 6 p.m. In this lecture, Khrystyna Semeryn will be talking about three powerful women’s voices of the 20th century, the world-famous poetesses of Jewish descent come from the Ukrainian lands. The victim of Shoah Zuzanna Ginczanka from Rivne become a sensation of the Polish literature, a native of today’s Chernivtsi Rose Auslender is a renowned German poetess, while a prominent Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Argentina, in a family who had emigrated from Rivne a couple of years earlier. In their poetry, the three speak about the radically different experiences, their womanhood, a war and the Holocaust, life and death as well as keep coming back to their small homeland. How their texts work the media of cultural memory of the Shoah? What language do they seek for expressing the experience which cannot be expressed in terms of ordinary language? What connects the three writers with their homeland?

About the speaker: Khrystyna Semeryn is a Ukrainian researcher and writer, specializing in cultural memory, gender, Jewish studies, literature, sculpture, and cultural policy and disinformation analyses. She is Visiting Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington, research fellow in Jewish studies at Fordham University, Think-Visegrad fellow at Centre for Eastern Studies, former virtual visiting researcher at Northwestern University, holder of the Ukrainian President’ Scholarship and others. Semeryn has been a member of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies since 2019 and also works as an independent analyst in collaboration with Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, freelancer in a range of media, expert for the Ukrainian Book Institute as well as served as an expert for the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, and editor of Geopoetical Studies.

The lecture will be in English.

Please register in advance by email [email protected] or by phone 8 604 15 765.
The entrance is free. We look forward to seeing you on October 20th. (Thursday) at 6 p.m. at Vilnius Jewish Public Library (Gedimino Ave. 24, entrance from Vilnius Small Theater yard).