Karolina Szymaniak | Delivered in Yiddish. 

Chaim Chajes, secretary of YIVO's Ethnographic Commission and a figure central to establishing its early research program, is barely mentioned in publications devoted to Jewish ethnography. Daniel Fajnsztejn, the first Doctor of Ethnology at Stefan Batory University in Vilna, appears in the pages of Jewish history only as a member of the "Paper Brigade" in the Vilna Ghetto. Their near complete invisibility in Polish and Jewish intellectual history is, in part, a result of their simultaneous membership in two different cultural spheres and intellectual worlds – as figures of the Polish-Jewish "cultural borderland." This lecture will present fuller profiles of both researchers and their role in shaping modern ethnography and what could have become a new field of study, the development of which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.

This work is based on research conducted together with Prof. Anna Engelking.

About the Speaker
Karolina Szymaniak is Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of Wroclaw and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw). Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, and translation studies. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the POLIN Museum and as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz. Her recent publications include Montages: Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City and My wild goat: Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets (in Polish). She is also the editor of Rachel Auerbach's Ghetto Writings (in Polish), which received the 2016 Polityka History Award, as well as the memoirs of Malke Lee and Hinde Bergner.