We are happy to announce that our guest of honor will be the esteemed writer and scholar

Régine Robin, professor emerita of Université du Québec à Montréal.

Our keynote speakers will be eminent authorities in the field:

Prof. Goldie Morgentaler (University of Lethbridge, Alberta), a celebrated translator.

Prof. Sherry Simon (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec), a specialist on translation theory and cultural contact
Prof. Norman Ravvin (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec), an established writer.

 

We are also proud to have Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Program Director of the Core Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, as our Guest Speaker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Prof. Régine Robin

 

 

Régine Robin a été Assistante et Maître-Assistant à l’Université de Paris X Nanterre. Installée au Québec depuis 1977, de 1982 à 2004, elle a été professeur au Département de sociologie de l'Université du Québec à Montréal dont elle est aujourd’hui Professeur Émérite. Parmi ses principales publications, on compte : Histoire et linguistique,  1973; Le Cheval blanc de Lénine ou l'Histoire autre, 1979; L'Amour du yiddish: écriture juive et sentiment de la langue (1830‑1930),  1984;  Kafka, 1989; Le Roman mémoriel: de l'Histoire à l'écriture du hors-lieu, 1989; Le Réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible, 1986/ Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, 1992 ; Le Deuil de l'origine: une langue en trop, la langue en moins, 1993 (rééd.2003); Le Naufrage du siècle, 1995, Le Golem de l’écriture. De l’autofiction au Cybersoi, 1998; Berlin Chantiers. Essai sur les passés fragiles, 2001; La mémoire saturée, 2003; Mégapolis. Les derniers pas du flâneur, 2009; Nous autres les autres. Difficile pluralisme, 2011; Le mal de Paris (à paraître en janvier 2014).

Régine Robin a traduit du yiddish les nouvelles de David Bergelson.  Autour de la gare / Joseph Shur.  Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1982, et le roman de Moïshe Kulbak  Les Zelminiens.  Paris: Seuil, 1988. Elle a obtenu le Prix du Gouver­neur général au Canada en 1987 pour Le Réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible. A la fois romancière (La Québécoite, 1993), nouvelliste (L’immense fatigue des pierres. Biofictions, 1997; Cybermigrances. Traversées fugitives, 2004) et universitaire, Régine Robin a mené depuis vingt ans des recherches sur les identités, la langue et la littérature, les cultures de l’entre-deux guerres, les problèmes de la mémoire et les usages du passé, la culture juive de langue yiddish ainsi que sur la poétique des grandes villes. Elle est membre de la Société Royale du Canada.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​Prof. Goldie Morgentaler

 

 

Goldie Morgentaler is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches 19th-century British and American literature, as well as  modern Jewish literature. She is the author of Dickens and Heredity (Palgrave 2000) and of numerous articles on Dickens and Victorian Literature. Her translations from Yiddish to English include several short stories by I. L. Peretz, which appeared in the I. L. Peretz Reader (1990). She is the translator of much of Chava Rosenfarb’s work, including the play The Bird of the Ghetto, which was performed by Threshold Theatre of Toronto in November of 2012. She is also the translator of the three volumes of Rosenfarb’s seminal Holocaust novel, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Her translation of Rosenfarb’s book of short stories, Survivors: Seven Short Stories won the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in 2005 and the Modern Language Association’s Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies in 2006.

She has also translated from French into Yiddish Michel Tremblay’s classic French-Canadian play Les Belles-Soeurs, which was performed by the Yiddish Theatre of Montreal in 1992. Most recently, she is the editor of Chava Rosenfarb’s book of poems in English translation,  Exile At Last: The Poems of Chava Rosenfarb, published by Guernica Editions in 2013. She is currently at work on a biography of Chava Rosenfarb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Sherry Simon

 

Sherry Simon is a professor in the French Department at Concordia University.  Among her recent publications are Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006)  which appeared in French translation in 2008 as Traverser Montréal. Une histoire culturelle par la traduction and Cities in Translation  (Routledge 2012) which appeared in French translation as Villes en Traduction: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelone, Montréal. Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2013.  She is co-editor of:  Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era, (Ottawa University Press 2000), New Readings of Yiddish Montreal-Traduire le Montréal Yiddish (University of Ottawa Press 2007) and Failure’s Opposite. Listening to A.M. Klein (McGill 2011) and editor of In Translation, Essays in Honour of Sheila Fischman (2013). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of a member of L’Académie des lettres du Québec. She was a Killam Research Fellow (2009-11) and  in 2010 she received the Prix André-Laurendeau  from l’Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

Prof. Norman Ravvin​

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Norman Ravvin's work investigates Canadian culture and landscape in a variety of venues.  In his fiction, he has placed novels in Calgary and Vancouver, often with a backdrop that makes use of Canada's Jewish Polish heritage.  His travel book, Hidden Canada, sought out lesser known places and stories across the country, including the southern Ontario towns ofnthe Underground Raildroad and the Jewish prairie colonies of Saskatchewan.  His scholarly work has focused on such authors as Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton and Mordecai Richler.  Presently, he is at work on a novel, entititled The Typewriter Girl, set in Vancouver and north of Warsaw.  He will contribute an essay on Canadian Jewish literature to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature.   He is presently writing the introduction for wood engraver George Walker's wordless biography of Leonard Cohen.  A native of Calgary, he studied in Vancouver and Toronto, taught Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick, and now teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.  His most recent novel, The Joyful Child, is set in Toronto, Montreal, parts of the United States and on Vancouver Island.  Other publications include A House of Words, Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory, the story collection Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, and the co-edited volumes The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader and Failure's Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein.

Photo: courtesy of the Montreal Gazette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

 

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Distinguished Professor at New York University, is Program Director of the Core Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the site of the former Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood. She was born and raised in Toronto. Her mother was born in Brest Litovsk and her father in Opatów. They left for Canada before the war. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (edited with Jonathan Karp). Her edited volume Writing a Modern Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Salo W. Baron won a National Jewish Book Award. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, which she coauthored with her father Mayer Kirshenblatt, also won two Canadian book awards.In 2008, she was honored with the award for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Vienna Jewish Museum, and new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.