‘After: Poetry Destroys Silence’—Virtual Film Screening and Conversation

The film After: Poetry Destroys Silence juxtaposes two competing claims about poetry after genocide and unspeakable horrors: Theodor Adorno’s statement, “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Charles Bukowski’s rebuttal, “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”

After explores poetry written about the Shoah, in which contemporary poets respond to the Holocaust and talk about the importance and need for poetry in a world that still grapples with genocide. Rather than seeing the devastation, After shows how poets respond to catastrophe and write in its aftermath. The film is ultimately about human resiliency, the power and courage to forge new lives, and the value of poetry in looking to the past to help create a better future.

The virtual panel discussion will include the film’s director Richard Kroehling, Amelia Glaser, a scholar of Slavic and Jewish literature from the nineteenth century to the present and the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020), and Anna Shternshis, a scholar of Jewish culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, oral history as well as Yiddish music and the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 – 1939 (2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (2017), and director of a Grammy-nominated project, Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WWII, which highlights forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.