Join us for a screening of Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?), a feature-length documentary film from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. The screening will be followed by a talkback with Susan Bronson, Executive Director of the Yiddish Book Center, and the film’s co-director and producer Christa P. Whitney, Director of the Wexler Oral History Project.

The film follows one woman’s journey to understand her grandfather, the Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever. In her attempt to better understand him, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon travels to Lithuania, using her grandfather’s diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust. Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by the New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust”—whose verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel. Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew and must rely on translation of her grandfather’s work, is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time.
This film is fully closed captioned.