Yiddish Poetry Night set

A Lawrence congregation is turning Yiddish poetry into a live public reading on Sunday, April 19, with local poets taking the stage in downtown Lawrence. (ljworld.com) The Lawrence Jewish Community Congregation said the event starts at 7 p.m. at the Lawrence Arts Center’s 10th and Mass Studios, Studio A, at 1000 Massachusetts St. The congregation and the Lawrence Arts Center list admission as free and say doors open at 6:30 p.m. (ljworld.com) (lawrenceartscenter.org) Organizers say the program centers on Avrom Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet born in 1913, and pairs readings from his work with original poems written in response by Lawrence writers. The congregation’s event page says the night has support from the Yiddish Book Center. (lawrenceartscenter.org) (ljcc.shulcloud.com) Yiddish is the historic everyday language of Ashkenazi Jews, and Sutzkever is one of its major 20th century poets. YIVO’s encyclopedia says he lived in Vilna, wrote through the Second World War, and became a central figure in modern Yiddish literature. (encyclopedia.yivo.org) The Yiddish Book Center and Poetry Foundation both describe Sutzkever as a writer whose poems recorded life in the Vilna ghetto, escape, and survival. That makes a community reading in Kansas less about academic study than about carrying a language and its literature into a new local setting. (yiddishbookcenter.org) (poetryfoundation.org) The event listing says no prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. That lowers the barrier for people who know the language, people who know Jewish history, and people who are simply coming to hear contemporary poets read aloud. (lawrenceartscenter.org) The congregation’s calendar shows the poetry night on the same day as a Yiddish class earlier that morning, another sign that the group is building public programming around the language this spring. The listings place both events on Sunday, April 19. (ljcc.shulcloud.com 1) (ljcc.shulcloud.com 2) For Lawrence, the immediate next step is simple: doors at 6:30 p.m., readings at 7 p.m., and a room full of local voices working through Sutzkever’s poems in public. (lawrenceartscenter.org)