Alex Averbuch: Readings from "The Jewish King" and "Of Rage and Longing"

Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: Pritsak Memorial Library at HURI, 34 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Poetry Reading by Alex Averbuch, current Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and 2024 HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

Alex Averbuch will read, in the original Ukrainian and in English translation, from his latest book Zhydivsky korol (The Jewish King, a 2023 finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize), as well as from his upcoming collection, Of Rage and Longing, and answer questions from the audience. Averbuch's poetry deals with interwoven Jewish-Ukrainian relations through the prism of his family history and Ukraine's multiethnic past and present. The book features poeticized documentary materials related to the Second World War: letters by Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine, interwoven with letters by Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives, as well as poems about the Russo-Ukrainian war currently taking place in his home region of Luhans’k. Unsettling but ultimately liberatory de-specifications of ethnos, language, and sexuality relieve trigger-points in Ukraine’s history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.

Alex Averbuch, a poet, translator, and scholar, is the author of four books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. English translations of his poems have appeared in the Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Plume, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, Sugar House Review, Constellations, and Common Knowledge. His latest book Zhydivs’kyi korol' (The Jewish King), from which most of the forthcoming English collection Of Rage and Longing derives, was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature. Averbuch is active in promoting Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He has translated into Hebrew and published over thirty selections of poetry by contemporary Ukrainian poets. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. Alex is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a future HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. He has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto.