Monthly Archives: March 2021

Does In Geveb Interview Misrepresent the History of the 1990s Oxford Magazine ‘Yiddish Pen’?



IN GEVEB WATCH  |  OPINION  |  YIDDISH AFFAIRS

Ayelet Brinn’s well-intentioned interview with Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krוtikov, published today in In Geveb, fails to ask the two veterans of Aaron Vergelis’s Sovetish Heymland about their controversial role in 1990s Oxford, together allegedly wrecking the Oxford Programme in Yiddish that had done so much in Yiddish Studies. They did so, allegedly, while becoming part of campaigns of personal destruction against the scholars who brought them there in the first place and worked countless hours to raise the support and facilities to bring them. Estraikh presented himself as a penniless graduate student in Moscow begging for help in the wake of the USSR’s collapse (winter 1990-1991) and came to study (in 1991) with Dovid Katz and Dov-Ber Kerler. Krutikov, by contrast, was an already-emigrated young scholar whom JTS’s main man in Yiddish recommended for Oxford as part of the wider project to dismantle the Oxford Program in Yiddish he had been railing against for years; he arrived in 1996, after a pseudo-search committee set up so that the JTS man’s recommendation would be the only one taken into account. The ex-Soviets went on to artfully trash the scholars who spent decades building the program. In classic Sovetish Heymland style intrigue mode, Krutikov was brought to Oxford primarily to serve as for-hire hit man in Soviet-style intrigue. Both former students of A. Vergelis, both gifted actors and masters of machinations, used it as a launch pad for American careers and rapidly destroyed the magnificent program that they had usurped. That history will be written and is very heavily documented (down to Estraikh’s apology for plagiarizing a grammar of one of his teachers, which he then “fixed” with a recall of the entire edition and addition of a front-cover credit sticker; the original is now a collector’s item). What is weird in the third decade of the twenty-first century is the (ab)use of In Geveb for an agenda of rewriting recent Yiddish Studies history for the glorification of a rather curious-bedfellow clique bringing together veterans of JTS and Sovetish Heymland (perhaps united by disdain for mainstream cultural Yiddishism, such as that of the late lamented Yiddish educator Naomi Prawer Kadar for whom one of the naive and manipulated enabling funding bodies is rightfully named).

See also:

DH’s section on History of — Yiddish at Oxford

Keepsakes & Documents

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Belgian Composer Releases New Video on Eve of March 16th



ROLAND BINET  |  ARTS  |  MUSIC  |  LATVIA  |  RIGA’s WAFFEN SS  MARCHES  | REGIONAL FAR-RIGHT MARCHES  | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED

Roland Binet, a Belgian composer working out of  De Panne, has just released on Youtube a new video comprising his musical composition to a series of photographs by his wife Francine Binet taken during their joint visit to Riga in 2012, the Latvian capital, to monitor that year’s far-right March 16th parade. The annual marches  glorify the Waffen SS, which fought for the Nazis and whose members all swore the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Mr. Binet is a veteran contributor to Defending History. His most recent and for many, quite startling piece, divulges the hard-to-believe erection of a monument to the Latvian Waffen SS in a town in Belgium.

 

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Latvian Waffen SS Worshippers Have Set Up a Monument in — Belgium



OPINION  |  LATVIA  |  BELGIUM  |  COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED  |  HISTORY  |  POLITICS OF MEMORY

by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)

Authorities in Riga, Latvia, who tolerate marches and memorials for the nation’s Waffen SS, that fought for Hitler and swore an oath to him, are nonetheless careful not to allow an overt monument to Nazi forces in Riga. How is it that modern-day glorifiers of the Waffen SS have managed to persuade a town in Belgium to host just such a monument (pictured in both images above)? The monument stands at the “Brivibaplin” in Zedelgem, a  town situated in the province of West-Vlaanderen (West Flanders) in Belgium; GPS coordinate’s are 51.15 lat. 3.1333 long, some 20 kilometres west of Bruges.

 

What does Latvia have in common with Flanders in Belgium? Believe it or not: a monument in honor of Latvian Waffen SS on Flemish soil in Belgium, a country in the heart of the European Union and prime home of the European Parliament. The Latvian Waffen SS was part of Adolf Hitler’s forces in wartime, Holocaust-era Eastern Europe and its member all swore an oath to Hitler. So how could this be? This is how the official press release put it on the day:

“On 23 September 2018, in the Belgian town of Zedelgem, the ‘Monument to Freedom’ sculpted by Latvian sculptor Kristaps Gulbis was unveiled. The monument is dedicated to the Latvian Legionnaires, who did not lose faith in freedom for the Latvian State, during the winter of 1945 to 1946 when they were held in Zedelgem prisoner of war camp.”

As  excerpt from Mr. Valters Nollendsorf’s speech on the occasion:

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