April 6, 2024 | 7pm, doors open at 6:30pm

Online ticket sales are now closed; however, a limited number of tickets will be available for purchase at the door.

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, the film’s co-director and editor Emily Felder, 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.

Christa P. Whitney is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,000 in-depth video interviews about Yiddish language and culture with people of all ages and backgrounds. Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature at Smith. She has studied Yiddish language at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Workers Circle, and the Yiddish Book Center. For the past ten years, she has traveled near and far recording oral history interviews, while also managing a video archive and producing documentary films and web features about all aspects of Yiddish language and culture. Christa was recently named on the 2020 Forward 50 list of “people we needed in a year we definitely didn’t.”

Susan Bronson holds a PhD in Russian history and Jewish history from the University of Michigan and has served in her current role as Executive Director of the Yiddish Book Center for more than a decade. Previously, she worked in nonprofit culture and higher education for more than twenty years in organizations including the Social Science Research Council in New York and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA. She currently serves as chair of the Board of the Council of American Jewish Museums and on the board of 7000 Languages, an organization dedicated to saving and teaching indigenous languages.

Emily Felder is a film editor whose work has been internationally screened in museums, libraries, schools, and festivals. She attended the University of Massachusetts where she studied anthropology, journalism, and documentary film. She worked as the premier technical assistant for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, and as an assistant editor at Florentine Films/Hott Productions on feature-length documentaries broadcast on PBS. She is now an editor and videographer based in Los Angeles where she continues to make films.

Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) Film Screening

April 6, 2024 | 7pm, doors open at 6:30pm

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