25 October 2024

Lecture by Dovid Katz “Cultures of the Litvaks”

Monday evening, 4 November at 6 pm, our library invites you to the lecture by Dovid Katz „Cultures of the Litvaks“. The lecture will take place at the Vilnius Jewish Public Library (Gedimino av.24). Entrance is in the courtyard of Vilnius Small State Theatre.

Lecture in English. Admission free.

The survey will introduce you to the cultural trends and content of Lithuanian Jewry (the Litvaks) over the last seven hundred years, incorporating linguistic, religious, Talmudic, mystical and ethicist trends, and progressing to the array of modernist movements that comprise specifically Litvak incarnations of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, Jewish socialist movements, and specifically, the rise of the modern Hebrew language and of modern Yiddish scholarship. Folkloristic and contentious aspects of Litvak identity will not be omitted.

Dovid Katz, a native of New York City, grew up in the home of Lithuanian Yiddish (and English) poet Menke Katz who was born in Švenčionys (Yiddish Svintsyán). After graduating from Columbia University, Dovid settled in Britain to complete his doctorate on the origins of Yiddish. He founded and for eighteen years led Yiddish studies at Oxford University. After a stint at Yale (1998-1999), he relocated to Vilnius where he introduced Yiddish studies at Vilnius University where he was professor for eleven years (1999-2010). For three decades, he traversed the Litvak lands (including Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, eastern Ukraine, northeastern Poland and more) to record the language and memories of the last Litvaks in their lands. The resulting Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA) is now being digitized and is available free online. At present he is also at work on the Yiddish Cultural Dictionary (YCD), known in Yiddish as Vílner Vérterbukh. He has published a number of papers on the Lithuanian Holocaust and contentious current debates. Most of his books are available free online via his website, www.dovidkatz.net. He divides the year between Vilnius and North Wales in the UK. His awards over the years include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Leverhulme award, and the major Yiddish literary prizes including the Manger, Grade, and Rubinlicht awards. Last year, B’nai B’rith Australia awarded him its Lifetime Achievement award.

In addition to his classic Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2nd revised edition, Baltos lankos: Vilnius 2010), he is the author of Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks, Vilna Jewish Book Stamps, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Yiddish and Power, and hundreds of articles and papers. In the realm of fiction, he has published four volumes of collected original short stories in Yiddish, the vast majority of which are set in pre World War I Lithuania. Translations in book form have appeared in English, German, and Italian, and one is in progress in Hebrew. This week, a second English anthology, From East Broadway to Whitechapel, appears in the UK.

Briefly about the event

Date

4 November

Time

6 pm

Place

Vilnius Jewish Public Library (Gedimino av. 24)
Entrance is in the courtyard of Vilnius Small State Theatre

Duration

2 h

Attendance

free

Important

the lecture will be held in English

More information

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