Episode 0250: The Outback Quest of Yiddish Poet Melekh Ravitsh

08/03/2020 27 min
Episode 0250: The Outback Quest of Yiddish Poet Melekh Ravitsh

Listen "Episode 0250: The Outback Quest of Yiddish Poet Melekh Ravitsh"

Episode Synopsis

Author Anna Epstein visits with us from her home in Australia to talk about her recently published book about Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh. The book tells the story of Ravitsh's 1933 trek across the Australian outback in search of a homeland for the threatened Jews of Europe. Along the way, he took photographs, which inspired his son, Yosl Bergner, to create a series of paintings. Inspired by this wildly imaginative pair and their prescient recognition of the common fate of Indigenous Australians and persecuted European Jews, curator and writer Anna Epstein has threaded together their stories and images into a brilliant and moving book.

Episode 0250
March 8, 2020
Yiddish Book Center
Amherst, Massachusetts