Multidirektionale Assemblage

Multidirectional Assemblage: Boris Khersonskii’s Family Archive Boris Khersonskii’s most acclaimed and translated volume of poetry Semeinyi arkhiv [Family Archive] (2003/2006) consists of semi-fictional miniatures narrating the sufferings of the members of a Southwest-Ukrainian Jewish Family in the short 20th century. The speaker’s laconic tone invites less of a trauma-studies approach to the Stalinist Great Terror and the Shoah than a media-sensitive update of the formalist focus on material devices and the determination of meaning from below. This contribution proposes to read Family Archive as an assemblage of imagined material media (photographs, letters, auction objects) which trace multidirectional vectors of commemoration. It proposes the notion of directionality for resolving the undecidability of referential and a-referential readings of quasi-documentary poetry.

Sipping Whiskey in Memphis

Robert Bernasconi (RB): Jonathan, to get us started, tell me about your background and what brought you to focus on the intersections of existentialism and racism?Jonathan Judaken (JJ): Well, I grew up in a Jewish family in Johannesburg in Apartheid South Africa. And I think all of those very specific facets of my upbringing are important to the trajectory of my work. My work has been a process of unthinking and dismantling and coming to terms with a past, a family, a legacy that very much defines who I am. I’m attempting to understand myself within the broader frameworks within which I grew up. I left South Africa permanently when I was twelve. This was in the immediate aftermath of the Soweto Riots that were steered by the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, under the leadership of Steve Biko, a thinker whose framework is so clearly influenced by existentialism.

Tom Stoppard: European Phantom Pain and the Theatre of Faux Biography

The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in 1977. It also provides evidence that Stoppard, since the 1990s, had begun to target emotional responses from his audience to redress the intellectual cool that seems to have shaped his earlier, “absurdist” phase. This turn towards emotionalism, the increasingly elegiac obsession with doubles, unrequited lives, and memory are linked to a set of biographical turning points: the death of his mother and the investigation into his Czech-Jewish family roots, which laid bare the foundations of the Stoppardian art. Examining this kind of “phantom pain” in two of his 21st-century plays, Rock’n’Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2019), the essay argues that Stoppard’s work in the 21st century was increasingly coloured by his biography and Jewishness—bringing to the fore an important engagement with European history that helped Stoppard become aware of some blind spots in his attitudes towards Englishness.

The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif

The Soviet Jewish poet Moisei Teif, whose young son was murdered during the Holocaust, wrote a number of poems in Yiddish on the taboo subject of the massive loss of Jewish children during the Second World War—a trauma that almost every Soviet Jewish family experienced, but often lied or kept silent about. This chapter focuses on one poem in particular, “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh,” which was translated into Russian and incorporated into a play, and which, in the course of time, became an emblematic work for Soviet Jews who, for years, had lacked the language (or means) to commemorate their losses.

1827–1829

The letters that Lady Beaumont writes to the Wordsworths in her widowhood are richly detailed. Part V brings into focus two major interests that she pursues in defiance of her grief: gardening (both practical and theoretical) and religious meditation. Lady Beaumont also takes comfort from the 1827 edition of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. She comments with feeling on the fraught issues of the Corn Laws and the Catholic Relief Act. Knowing that Wordsworth disagreed with her support for Catholic Emancipation, her comments on Wordsworth’s poems ‘The Egyptain Maid’, ‘Incident at Bruges’, and ‘A Jewish Family’ may be read as a subtle critique of Anglican prejudice. The sequence of letters ends with Sir George Howland Willoughby’s announcement of Lady Beaumont’s death in July 1829.