Mayer Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934. He taught himself to paint at age 73 and made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, “lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived.” In this talk his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, will discuss her father’s legacy and recent exhibitions of his work, including the current exhibition at the POLIN Museum, which presents a dialogue between Mayer’s depictions of his youth in the shtetl and today’s Opatów, a post-Jewish town with no remaining Jewish community.

Join us for a talk with David Mazower, the Yiddish Book Center’s research bibliographer and the chief curator and writer of the Center’s acclaimed permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture. David will share his favorite objects and images from the exhibition, stories of the search for original artifacts, and reflections on how the exhibition speaks to us about the past, present, and future of Yiddish culture and community.

During and immediately after World War II, Eastern European Jews perceived a radical transformation in the Yiddish language. This perception inspired some intellectuals to create dictionaries and glossaries that deciphered the metamorphosis of Yiddish words. Others incorporated this new strain of Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In this conversation, Hannah will explore Khurbn Yiddish (Yiddish of the Holocaust) as a form of Holocaust memory. Following the conversation there will be a book signing.