[Mendele] MENDELE PERSONAL NOTICES & ANNOUNCEMENTS--Dovid Katz on "Who are the Litvaks" in Manhattan April 11

[Victor Bers]

MENDELE PERSONAL NOTICES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

March 7, 2016

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From:: AmandaSeigel at nypl.org

"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. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

Reference Desk: 212-930-0601
Fax: 212-642-0141
Email: AmandaSeigel at nypl.org
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