The seventh colloquium in the series features Alex Moshkin, Institute Fellow, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He will present on “Likhie 90-e in Israel: Contemporary Russophone Poets Revisit Their Migration to Israel”
Register for virtual event: http://bit.ly/REEES-AlexMoshkin
The talk will focus on contemporary poetry by the younger generation of Russian émigré writers to Israel produced in the last 10 years. In the talk, I explore the surprising presence of nostalgia in these works, which resist dominant Cold War-era portrayals of Jewish life in the USSR as a series of catastrophes and disasters. In a dialectical manner, I will show how the romanticized depiction of life in the Soviet Union by these artists derives in large part from the suffering and rapid downward social mobility that the Russian-speaking community experienced in Israel in the 1990s.
Alex Moshkin received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he has been a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on multilingual Russian-Jewish literature, cinema, and visual art in the late 20th and early 21st century in Israel. His book project, Russian-Israeli Culture: In Search of Identity, investigates how Russian-speaking émigrés to Israel created a cultural identity for themselves in sync with the Israeli society. He is also working on an English-language anthology of contemporary Russian-Israeli poetry in Hebrew and Russian.