Writing the Limits: Crises of Perception in Jewish Literature

How can a poem, a painting, or a story bear witness to catastrophe where testimony alone falls short?

What can a poem, a painting, or a short story tell us about catastrophe that a history book or eyewitness account cannot? This session brings together four scholars who look at how Jewish writers and artists have responded to the twentieth century’s darkest moments, often indirectly, through imagery, atmosphere, and myth.

Denise León begins with Henriette Asséo, a French poet from a Sephardic family who wrote about the Holocaust in verse, asking whether a poem can serve as testimony. Danny Luzon looks at Celia Dropkin, a New York Yiddish writer and painter whose 1934 novel and later paintings let history drift in like a change in the weather. Caroline Rody compares two stories, one by Isaac Bashevis Singer from 1962 and one by David Bezmozgis from 2025, about fathers struggling to understand their children in the aftermath of upheaval. Marat Grinberg closes with Friedrich Gorenstein’s Psalm, a daring novel written in 1970s Moscow and newly translated into English, in which a biblical avenger walks through famine, war, and the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Ranging across French, Yiddish, Russian, and English, this panel invites audiences to consider how literature might bear witness to what straightforward accounts cannot.

Denise León is a poet and scholar from Argentina with Sephardic family roots. She teaches literature and communication at universities in Salta and Tucumán. Her most recent book of poems traces the stories of Sephardic families who settled in northern Argentina.

Danny Luzon teaches English at the University of Haifa in Israel. He writes about Yiddish culture and Jewish American literature, from Yiddish-language Shakespeare to TV shows like Broad City.

Caroline Rody is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She writes about American, Jewish, and Caribbean fiction, including the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Marat Grinberg holds the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University. Born in Ukraine, he is the author of The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, about how Jews in the USSR used books to keep their identity alive.

This public program is presented as an open session of the annual Jewish American & Holocaust Literature (JAHLit) Symposium, hosted by Tulane's Jewish Studies Department