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Millersville University’s annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide celebrates its 41st year with two free March events centered on the theme “Translating Trauma into Literature and Performing Arts.”
Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka
The conference’s first event, “Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka,” is a panel discussion and poetry reading at 7 p.m., March 3, in Myers Auditorium, McComsey Hall. Sponsored in part by the Jewish Community Alliance of Lancaster, the event will feature the poetry of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Polish-Jewish poet who was executed by the Nazis at the age of 27 in 1944.
Translators Dr. Joanna Trzeciak Huss, Dr. Mira Rosenthal and Alex Braslavsky will share English versions of her poems and discuss the challenges of bringing this unique voice to American audiences.
Ginczanka was born Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in Kiev in 1917. She and her family fled shortly after the Russian Revolution to the border town of Równe in Volhynia (present day Rivne, Ukraine). She adopted the name Ginczanka, and though Russian was her native tongue, chose Polish as her language of poetic expression.
Ginczanka later moved to Warsaw, where she was celebrated in literary circles and published her only collection of poetry, “On Centaurs.” At the outset of the war, she was living in Lwów, which the Soviets occupied until the Nazi invasion in 1941. The relentless pursuit and extermination of Jews eventually sent her into hiding.
“She ended up hiding, which was hard to do with her striking looks and dark skin,” says Dr. Katarzyna Jakubiak, associate professor of English and world languages, who is moderating the panel discussion and chairing the conference planning committee. “She was eventually turned into the Nazis by her landlady but bribed her way out of that and moved. She later wrote a poem about her landlady while she was in hiding. It was used after the war as evidence in the trial of the landlady’s cooperation with Nazis.” There are currently four published or forthcoming English translations of Ginczanka’s poetry. “She is a forgotten voice who has been rediscovered,” says Jakubiak.
Last spring, Jakubiak led a book club that discussed a recently translated memoir of the Hungarian Holocaust survivor József Debreczeni. She was inspired by Debreczeni’s depiction of the Holocaust as an “other worldly experience” in which the usual laws of moral gravity did not apply. “It is incomprehensible to contemporary people who live in relatively peaceful times,” says Jakubiak. “The process of making us understand this experience resembles translation from another language.”
Jakubiak’s scholarly interest in translation and inspiration from the memoir introduction led to the establishment of the theme for this year’s Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide.
“It is also worth remembering that the Holocaust happened literally in languages other than English. Our poetry panel directly tackles this specific challenge of conveying Holocaust history to American audiences,” says Jakubiak. “Ginczanka, the poet that the panel focuses on, chose Polish as her language, but her background encompasses Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and French as well. The growing international interest in her poetry indicates that her work, perhaps partly because of these multilingual influences, has extraordinary vitality that counterbalances her premature death.
Before the panel, Joanna Trzeciak Huss will lead a teacher’s workshop about teaching Holocaust poetry in translation. Trzeciak Huss is an acclaimed scholar and translator, known, among other things, for translating Nobel-prize-winning Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry into English.
Here There Are Blueberries
The theme of translation continues through the P. Alan and Linda Loss Keynote Lecture at 7 p.m., March 19, in Biemesderfer Concert Hall, Winter Center.
Tony- and Emmy-nominated director and playwright Moisés Kaufman will discuss his award-winning play “Here There Are Blueberries” as a form of translation of Holocaust history. The event will include dramatic readings excerpted from the play and performed by Millersville University students.
Kaufman is a Venezuelan-Jewish American theater director, playwright, filmmaker, founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City and cofounder of Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre. He was awarded the 2016 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, and his work was represented earlier this year at Millersville with its production of “The Laramie Project.”
Conceived by Kaufman and cowritten by Amanda Gronich, “Here There Are Blueberries” is a play “inspired by interviews conducted with the real people depicted in it, historical transcripts and other primary sources,” according to Kaufman’s “A Note About the Text.”
“Those real people include researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, family members of Nazi officials and others,” says Barry Kornhauser, assistant director of campus and community engagement at the Ware Center for the Arts, who serves on the conference planning committee. “The impetus was the discovery of a lost photo album chronicling the daily lives of those running the Auschwitz concentration camp.”
During the keynote presentation – a dialogue with Kaufman – scenes of the play will be enacted by Millersville students to inform the conversation. Those scenes will include the projection of the photographic images – mostly from the album – accompanying the text, according to Kornhauser. Kaufman regards these as “an integral part of the fabric of the story.”
“The theme of this conference is ‘Translating Trauma into Literature and Performing Arts,’” Kornhauser says. “That is precisely what ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ does, by portraying a little-known side of the Holocaust’s horror through a theatrical telling. Furthermore, it serves as a profound transformative enhancement of what the researchers depicted in the play set out to do in exploring the photo album’s content.”
In the play’s script, one of the researchers says, “And it is our responsibility to receive these artifacts and make them available to scholars, to artists, to anthropologists, to all of these people whose job it is to translate experience into knowledge.”
“It is our committee’s belief that Kaufman’s keynote event itself will similarly serve to translate experience – a performative experience – into knowledge. Knowledge about the Holocaust certainly, but also about the capacity of ordinary mankind to execute extraordinary evil,” Kornhauser says. “It should hold interest to scholars, artists, anthropologists and to all people interested in modern history, theater, philosophy, photography and especially in human nature itself as a unique and compelling ‘translation’ of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’”
