Re: [Cz-L] draft response to the Mayor's office...

Dear Jerome and group,

your letter is fine, but I would suggest adding to the letter
something of the group's concerns about specific sites in the city
that are central to its Jewish history: primarily, the temple and the
cemetery. As someone working on memory and memorialization in my
academic work, i have been thinking hard about how such a rich and
fractured history could be adequately memorialized on site in a city
that, so far, has all but erased it. The plaques on the buildings
are one step, as is the monument to Paul Celan, but much remains to
be done.

   Other East and West European cities offer good models that
Chernivtsi officials could study-- I am thinking of Krakow which has
made a place for its Jewish past in it present, also Budapest,
Prague, and certainly Berlin. Of course, the solutions found there
are costly, but among our group there may be others who could act as
consultants on less expensive ways in which this might be done -- say
an exhibit in the temple that tells its history, includes
photographs, even recordings of Josef Schmidt. Our virtual archive
could be translated into a series of temporary and permanent
exhibitions. The library of Rosa Roth Zuckermann, I happen to know,
is still intact in her apartment -- here would be a chance to install
it in a public space, say a Chernivtsi Jewish library in her name,
that would archive all the layers of the city's rich literary and
cultural history and make it available for public viewing and borrowing.

   And a conference on memorialization in the context of the city's
Jewish history could generate ideas that draw on the work that other
cities have done. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

All best,

Marianne

Marianne Hirsch
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Institute for Research on Women and Gender
602 Philosophy Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
(212) 854-5121

http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2349

SUMMER ADDRESS:
355 Rte 132,Norwich VT. 05055
(802) 6491660

On Jul 21, 2006, at 8:49 AM, jerome schatten wrote:

> Czernowitzers: below is my first draft response for the Chernivtsi 600
> Celebration. Comments please.
> jerome
>
> ====================================================================
>
-snip-
Received on 2006-07-21 11:11:36