Modern-ish and Yonia Fain’s Yiddishland
Modern-ish and Yonia Fain’s Yiddishland
On September 13, 2023, an exhibition called Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland by the contemporary artist Yevgeniy Fiks opened at CUNY’s James Gallery, as a part of his project Yiddishland Museum of Modern Art.
Yonia Fain (1913-2013) was a renowned modernist artist and a Yiddish poet, author of 5 poetry books published in that language. During his life he travelled across the entire globe: from Ukraine and Lithuania to Japan, China and Mexico. Fiks told our website that his neologism “Modern-ish” refers to the special modernist tradition of Yiddishland, the global space of Yiddish culture, which does not quite fit into the canons of modernism. Representatives of this tradition often have multiple hyphenated identities: for example, one may be Lithuanian-Jewish-American.
We have already written on our website about Yevgeniy Fiks and his concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language, a cultural bridge capable of uniting traditional ethnicity with the principle of universalism, the local with the cosmopolitan and cosmic. In 2022, the Yiddishland pavilion, organized by Fiks, opened at the Venice Biennale. The current exhibition at CUNY will be open until December 9.
The publishing house Jaromír Hladík press in St. Petersburg published the Russian translation of Leib Kvitko’s Yiddish poetry book “1919”. A whole workshop of new Yiddish translators (about ten people), prepared by a special seminar held in St. Petersburg from 2021 to 2023, took part in this publication. The seminar, organized by the Judaica Center of the European University in St. Petersburg, was led by the poet Igor Bulatovsky. Yiddish was taught by two well known literature experts and translators, Valery Dymshits and Alexandra Glebovskaya.
On September 8, 2023, a presentation of Betzalel Frank’s newly published Russian language book “Vilnius Jewish Folk Theater. Pages of History” took place at the building of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius.
