Anna Elena Torres – “Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish” – Karen Underhill
@ Seminary Co-op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Tuesday, February 27th, from 6PM - 7PM
Anna Elena Torres will discuss Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature. She will be joined in conversation by Karen Underhill. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
Presented in partnership with The Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
At the Co-op
About the Book: Spanning the last two centuries, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. The narrative unfolds through a cast of historical characters, from the well known—such as Emma Goldman—to the more obscure, including an anarchist rabbi who translated the Talmud and a feminist doctor who organized for women’s suffrage and against national borders. Its literary scope includes the Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the journalism and modernist poetry of Anna Margolin, and the early radical prose of Malka Heifetz Tussman.
Anna Elena Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.
About the Author: Anna Elena Torres is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press, 2022).
About the Interlocutor: Karen Underhill is an Associate Professor of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity.
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