Rose and Isaac Ebel Lecture – Literary Metareflection in Extremis: Writing from Nazi Ghettos in Poland

The Program in Judaic Studies hosts this year’s Rose and Isaac Ebel Lecture, featuring Sven-Erik Rose, on Tuesday, February 10.

This lecture draws on Sven-Erik Rose’s recently published Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2025). The book is a study of how Jewish authors interned in Nazi ghettos grappled with and thought through the horror and destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the Gothic horror tale. Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions, and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of Nazi ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose’s readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.

More about Sven-Erik Rose

Sven-Erik Rose is a Professor of German and of Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, at the University of California, Davis. His scholarship and teaching focus on Jewish literature and intellectual history from Germany, France, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought.