Artists’ Books and the Repurposing of Jewish Literature
This project explores the material history of Jewish literature by examining a trio of artists’ books featuring the work of early twentieth century poets. Each artists’ book treats its original source material as a physical object. As a group, these books illuminate the often-precarious conditions in which modern Jewish literary sources were produced, and their ongoing physical vulnerability in archival settings. This appreciation for literature’s material qualities allows for a better understanding of how residue traces of the sacred continue to shape the evolution of secular literary genres. I use the term “repurposing” to indicate how these works respect the autonomy and inviolability of the earlier texts while also promoting the creation of new meaning for contemporary readers.
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Matilda Okinaite, The Unlocked Diary: Collected Works (2021), contains facsimile reproductions and translations of poems and excerpts from a personal diary by Matilda Okinaite, a Lithuanian Jewish poet who was murdered in 1941. |
Urban Poem: Unpublished Poems by Leah Goldberg, Inspired by Woodcuts by Franz Masareel (2012), includes expressionist wood cut prints and images of handwritten poems from a 1929 Masareel edition once owned by Goldberg herself. |
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Moshe Gershuni’s Thirteen Etchings for Poems by
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Sites of Memory in Israel/Palestine
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Landscape and memory continue to be ongoing research interests; an essay analyzing the textual and physical traces of Palestinian memory in the Jaffa neighborhood of Ajami, “'An Apartment to Remember': Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape," appears in History & Memory (2015).
Watch this short testimony, filmed in 2012 during an on-site visit with Zochrot to the remains of the village of Summeyl. |