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

Alex Averbuch: Readings from “The Jewish King” and “Of Rage and Longing” | Seminar in Ukrainian Studies

A 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.

For more information please visit the HURI event page.

This event is organized by Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and is part of the weekly Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.