Schwartz-Reisman Graduate Student Conference In Jewish Studies, "Jewish Problems"
When and Where
Description
Schwartz-Reisman Graduate Student Conference in Jewish Studies
Date: Monday, April 21, 2025
Location: JHB100 (170 St. George Street)
Co-organized by Jacob Hermant and Marissa Herzig
This conference will feature PhD students' work in the Granovsky-Gluskin Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies.
Graduate students in the Granovsky-Gluskin Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies will come together to share their interdisciplinary ideas in the field on this exciting day.
Keynote Lecture: "Hidden in Translation: The (Gendered) Politics of Translating Polish Language Diaries Written by Youth into English"
Date: Monday, April 21, 2025 at 4PM
Location: JHB100 (170 St. George Street)
Dorota Glowacka (University of King's College)
Hidden in Translation: The (Gendered) Politics of Translating Polish Language Diaries Written by Youth into English
This lecture focuses on the (gendered) politics of translating into English the diaries written in Polish by young people in the ghettos and in hiding. Considering the factors that precipitated the translation of these particular texts (but not others), I draw attention to the differences in historical, discursive and gendered contexts occupied by the original texts and their English-language translations. I am interested in the role of translation in either entrenching, negotiating, or transforming different modalities of memory politics in North America and in Central and Eastern Europe. The diaries, especially those written by youth, elude categorisation, dwelling in the liminal space between a historical document and a literary artefact. I ask about the role of translation in refashioning a private record into a work of Holocaust literature, and, in the case of diaries written by young women, into products of popular culture. I also consider intertextual translatory dynamic of the diaries (whose authors were multilingual), arguing that they anticipate what I’d like to call the “translatory turn” in Holocaust studies.
I primarily focus on four diaries: Dawid Sierakowiak (Łódź ghetto), Rutka Laskier (Będzin ghetto), Rywka Lipszyc (Łódź ghetto), and Melania Weissenberg/Molly Applebaum (Dąbrowa Tarnowska ghetto/in hiding). I aim to re-signify Walter Benjamin’s injunction that the task of the translator “is to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another” in the context of post-Holocaust “ecologies of witnessing” (Hanna Pollin-Galay). I suggest that the increasing attention to the role of translation in shaping the postmemorial landscape is related to the emergent awareness of the Western-centric dynamic that structures relations between cultures. I postulate a move toward decolonial modes of translating Holocaust texts, which are intersectional, emplaced, and fundamentally relational.
Dorota Glowacka is Professor of Humanities at the University of King’s College in K’jipuktuk/ Halifax, Canada. Glowacka is the author of From the Other Side: Testimony, Affect, Imagination, 2017, and Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics, 2012. She coedited Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, 2007, and Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries, 2002. Most recently, she co-edited, with Regina Mülhauser, a special issue of Journal for Holocaust Research on gender-based and sexual violence during the Holocaust. Glowacka has published numerous book chapters and journal articles in the area of Holocaust and genocide studies, continental philosophy, and gender and memory studies. Her current research focuses on gender and the Holocaust, the intersections of the Holocaust and settler colonial genocides in North America, and the politics of translating Holocaust diaries and memoirs. She is a member of the Academic Committee of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a participant in the international research consortium Thinking Through the Museum.