Events

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a poetry reading and conversation with Alex Averbuch. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.

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, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature), as well as new poems from his upcoming book, and answer questions from the audience. Averbuch’s poetry deals with interwoven Jewish-Ukrainian relations, issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory. 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.