Soviet Responses to Catastrophe: War, Holocaust, and Cultural Production in the Soviet Union

Today I attended a talk titled Soviet Responses to Catastrophe: War, Holocaust, and Cultural Production in the Soviet Union. This talk was mostly about Jewish writings, in Yiddish, in the Soviet Union during the period when the Red Army was fighting against Hitler. The speaker talked about two collections of songs, short stories, and Jewish folklore that were unpublished. They were unpublished because the Soviet censors did not approve them, but the writings were kept in a collection someplace, back East I think. The "Cabinet of Jewish Culture" was the Soviet group that put together one manuscript. Later, that group was disolved and members were sent to the Gulag, since any kind of Jewish ethnic, or national, unification wasn't an ideologically correct viewpoint. Overall, I'm happy I went to this talk. The speaker had an interesting subject matter.

I'm getting a new phone soon... 

The Presenter - and the backs of two people's heads.

The original documents were pretty cool looking - you could see censor stamps on some of them, others were written on the back of whatever paper scraps Jews could get inside concentration camps or ghettos.