Part of the Socialist Studies Seminar series
Hirsh Reles, the "last native Yiddish-writer in Belarus," produced a large oeuvre in Yiddish, Belarusian, and Russian. His Yiddish-language works give vivid accounts of the remnants of Jewish life and cutlure in postwar Belarus. Reles tells the stories of those who survived genocide and war and live in a region—the former Pale of Jewish Settlement—that has been shaped by imperial and Soviet natioanlity policies, moderniztaion, and postwar efforts to rebuild. This paper, part of a book project on the legacies of World War II and the Holocaust in Belarus, introduces Reles' work and proposes a reading attentive to the temporal and spatial dimensions of literary production and historical memory.
The Socialist Studies Seminar is co-sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Department of History and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. For further information, contact Wendy Goldman (goldman@andrew.cmu.edu) or Alissa Klots (alissaklots@pitt.edu).