Belarus in Berlin/Berlin in Belarus: Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim

Marc Caplan, Zelda & Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture, Johns Hopkins University

The two major works that Moyshe Kulbak completed while living in Berlin in the early 1920s count as significant achievements in Yiddish modernism, each poised between nostalgia and apocalypse. In each instance, the author’s location in Berlin obligated him to represent his Belorussian homeland through a variety of distorted, experimental, and innovative perspectives.