The concept of BIRTHPLACE in post-war Yiddish literature. The case of Reyzl Zykhlinsky

• In Event: Post-Holocaust Yiddish Publishing and Theater

Abstract

The proposed paper concerns a concept of the "birthplace" in Yiddish poetry of Reyzl Zykhlinsky. She was born in Gąbin, near Warsaw, in 1910. At the very beginning of the war she fled to Lviv, and then to Kolomea. In 1947 she returned to Poland, to learn that her mother, brothers and sisters, who had remained in Poland, had all died during the Holocaust. She described her experience of the return to Poland and the loss of the whole family in a book Tsu loytere bregn. In my paper I will discuss the conceptualization of the birthplace in her poetry, and draw some broader conclusions on the main determinants of the “birthplace” (both spatial and cultural, individual and shared with the community), considering a meaning of loss and return as well as a connection between the birthplace and identity.

Author

• Karolina Koprowska, the Jagiellonian University