Bret stopped by to say hi at our open house yesterday. It was the 20th reunion of his graduating class (2004). As a sophomore, 3 years earlier, he was in my course on the holocaust (co-taught then with the great Penny Marcus of our Italian department). That was the fall...
David Roberts & I talked yesterday about Primo Levi, ‘The Periodic Table,’ and the problem of forgiveness—an interview for David’s terrific Substack series: https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/about . Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pghED_cWOg
Larry Eigner’s “Dance.” He’s made a poem that uses language spoken by Simon Srebnik as he revisits Chelmno with Claude Lanzmann (decades after having barely survived that death camp). The Eigner poem is discussed by Michael Davidson in this essay: http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/davidson.html .
I have taught “Representations of the Holocaust” now for 36 years. This time we gathered together “in the room,” as we like to put it. Yes, in the room, having been kept from such human spaces for nearly three semesters. How could this course have been taught in any other...
Members of the Filreis family (all of them doomed to die later in the ghetto or to be gassed at Treblinka) gathered in a Warsaw graveyard, near family members’ plots, during my grandfather Ben’s brief visit back to Poland (in part to persuade family members to emigrate to Brooklyn—he did...
Soon after its release in 1985, Claude Lanzmann was asked by a film-world colleague about the title he had given his collage-like 9.5-hour modernist documentary. Here is what he said.
Leon Bass. I knew Leon a little bit (he lived in the Philly area) & he once came to speak to the students in my course on the holocaust & survivor testimony. He was a liberator of Buchenwald and the experience was both traumatic and charted a course through a...
I ask Hilton Als about his remarkable essay “It Will Soon Be Here,” a reflection on traumatic memory and the figure of the wall that keeps us from direct access to it. (This is a 9-minute clip from an hour-long conversation that took place on March 30, 2021.) LINK TO...
I am pleased to make available a copy of an essay by Anna Neumann: “Ways without Words: Learning from Silence and Story in Post-Holocaust Lives.” The essay can be viewed as a PDF document HERE.
I’ve been reading U.S. newspaper coverage during the year 1960 of the so-called “German economic miracle”—recovery led by huge American investments & made possible by political “rehabiliation.” Most news articles are glowing. Everyone is happy. This one covers the 20% of Germans who are unhappy about the prosperity, or not...
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. His new book is 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book about online pedagogy. He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 265,000 participants in 192 countries since 2012.
Founder/Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House—intro video ][ events calendar
Convener/teacher, “ModPo.” an open online course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry—overview of the course ][ intro video
Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—my Jacket2 commentary series ][ "First Readings"
Producer/host, PoemTalk podcast series—co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House & the Poetry Foundation
Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing—Creative Writing ][ RealArts internships ]
Co-founder & co-director of PennSound—50,000 files ][ 15 million downloads annually
Teacher & host, "Kelly Writers House Fellows"—since 1999 ][ Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Laurie Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman & more
Teacher, "Representations of the Holocaust"—a course on survivor testimony ][ my holocaust site
Click on the image for information about the book.