Debora Vogel with Anastasiya Lyubas and Karolina Szymaniak
Debora Vogel (1902-42) was a Yiddish and Polish poet, essayist, and aesthetic philosopher born in Burshtyn in Galicja, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland, now Western Ukraine. We mentioned her in our episode on Bruno Schulz with whom she was close, and it is said that the stories in Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops grew from letters to Vogel, but here we would like to consider her as an author in her own right. She came from a secularized, intellectual, left-zionist Jewish family, and completed a doctorate on Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy in Vienna and Kraków, which would become the basis for her friendship with Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (“Witkacy”) though he held very different views. She did not grow up speaking Yiddish at home, but was convinced by Rachel Auerbach to become a Yiddishist, which gave her access to an international language, but for a relatively narrow audience of Yiddish speakers who were interested in avantgarde poetry.
With this episode, we hope to open a discussion about position of Yiddish, and perhaps other languages other than Polish, in Polish literature. While some Yiddish writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland and set many of his stories in Poland, once said in an interview with Philip Roth that Polish and Yiddish writers were isolated from each other by language, figures like Vogel and Auerbach show that this was not entirely the case, and influence could flow in both directions.
Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guests on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website. The linked page includes Selected Works by and about Debora Vogel:
instytutpolski.pl/newyork/202...
Access the Playlist of the entire series:
bit.ly/Encounters-ALL
6 июн 2023
