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The Ancestors Are Watching: Entering the Poetry of Avot Yeshurun
- Pacific Time Virtual Program
$54.00
Course Summary for Search and Accessibility
This course, The Ancestors Are Watching: Entering the Poetry of Avot Yeshurun, is an Educational Program offered by New Lehrhaus. It is scheduled for three sessions beginning December 2, 2026 and ending December 16, 2026. The sessions are held on Wednesdays from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm Pacific Time.
The total registration fee is $54.00. The course is conducted Online and focuses on Avot Yeshurun's modern Hebrew poetry, language hybridity and diaspora across Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic, and memory, loss, and catastrophe in Jewish literature.
Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992) is one of modern Hebrew literature's most singular and disorienting voices — a poet who insisted Hebrew carry what it could barely hold: the diasporic weight of Yiddish and Arabic, and the ongoing presence of the dead among the living. Writing against the grain of the modern Hebrew literary establishment, Yeshurun forged an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic poetics that unsettles any clear border between languages, generations, and homelands.
In this three-session course, we'll enter Yeshurun's work through close attention to key poems in translation, alongside prose selections that illuminate his forceful relationship to language hybridity, translation, history, memory, amnesia, loss, and catastrophe. No prior familiarity with Yeshurun or Hebrew poetry is required — just a willingness to sit with the difficulty, strangeness, and resonant ghosts that his poetry hosts.
Who this is for:
- Readers curious about modern Hebrew poetry, Israeli literature, or 20th-century Jewish writing
- Anyone interested in translation, multilingualism, and diaspora in literature
- Students of Hebrew literature, Yiddish studies, or Jewish intellectual history
What you'll leave with:
- Close familiarity with key poems and prose by Avot Yeshurun, in translation
- A framework for reading Yeshurun's hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish-Arabic poetics
- A deeper understanding of how modern Hebrew literature grapples with memory, loss, and catastrophe
- Sharpened skills in close, patient reading of difficult, boundary-crossing poetry
Three Wednesdays: December 2, 9, and 16, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time
IMPORTANT NOTE: Zoom link/details will be emailed to you once you complete registration, one week before your program AND the day before. Please keep this information in a location easy to find.
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