The Poet as Seismograph: Ukrainian and Yiddish Poetry of the 1920s and Beyond A Conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The conference "The Poet as Seismograph: Ukrainian and Yiddish,” explores the parallels and convergences of Yiddish and Ukrainian poetry of the modernist era and beyond, tracing the interaction between poets and poetry in the two languages. In the first quarter of the twentieth century Kyiv and Kharkiv were major centers of new poetry in both languages. Ukrainian and Yiddish poets of the 1920s and 30s imagined their work as sounding boards and listening devices, sensitive to the reverberations of their era. Their poetry transmitted the political and social changes of their time, the sounds generated by new technologies and the pulse of the urban landscape. In 1924 a group of Kyiv Yiddish writers called their movement “Antenna,” for example. The same motif appears around a hundred years later.  The title work of Ukrainian poet Serhii Zhadan’s 2023 poetry collection Antenna (Antena) speaks of an antenna that both drips with blood but also captures unseen “signals of love from the atmosphere.” Specialists in both Ukrainian and Yiddish trace this theme and more in the conference and the volume to follow. The transnational, comparative, multilingual, and historical perspectives offered by this conference are particularly important in our era of heightened nativism and tunnel vision. The two literatures—Yiddish and Ukrainian—have come to the brink of extinction, and Ukrainian culture and Ukraine are currently under threat, making scholarly attention even more important.