Special Issue

Walking with Vogel

New perspectives on Debora Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship

This spe­cial issue of In geveb, edit­ed by Anas­tasiya Lyubas, Anna Ele­na Tor­res and Kathryn Heller­stein, brings togeth­er new per­spec­tives on Deb­o­ra Vogel through poet­ry, visu­al art, trans­la­tion, and schol­ar­ship, all in an attempt to fol­low the many lines of cre­ative and crit­i­cal inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work. The con­tri­bu­tions col­lect­ed in this vol­ume invite you to walk with Vogel, join­ing her rad­i­cal atten­tion to the unno­ticed’ mate­r­i­al of life.

Contents

Articles
Creative Interpretations and Translations
Related Materials

Articles

Article

Walking with Vogel: New Perspectives on Debora Vogel

Anna Elena Torres, Kathryn Hellerstein and Anastasiya Lyubas

This special issue invites you to walk with Debora Vogel as she maps the spaces of Jewish life through avant-garde forms. We bring together new perspectives on Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship, all in an attempt to follow the many lines of creative and critical inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work.

Click here for a pdf of this article.

Article

Reading as the Shaping Force of Life: Debora Vogel’s Contributions to Education

Anna Maja Misiak

Translation by Matthew Johnson

The writer and educator Debora Vogel contended with questions raised by avant-garde art in the 1920s and 1930s and, throughout her writings, repeated the following question as a leitmotiv: What does “life” mean and which forms does it assume? This article considers how Vogel engaged with these questions about form in various essays and in her educational work at the Jewish orphanage at Zborowska 8 in Lwów.

Article

The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads

Ekaterina Kuznetsova and Anastasiya Lyubas

By considering the image of the streetwalker in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this article deepens the understanding of Yiddish creativity as ultimately multimodal and interconnected.

Creative Interpretations and Translations

Blog

Montage-Murals: Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s “Present Figures” (Berlin 2021)

Anna Elena Torres

This spring, Debora Vogel’s poetry bloomed riotously across the faces of three buildings in Berlin. Passages from the collection Day Figures (Tog-Figurn, 1930) appeared in Vogel’s Yiddish and in translations into German, Arabic, and English, the letters of those four alphabets painted alongside hobo hieroglyphs, squatter runes, and paleotype. This series of calligraphic murals is the work of Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson (b. 1984).

Blog

Herring Barrels

Maia Grace

During the dog days of summer, lines of Vogel’s poetry hummed in my head, and I felt compelled to write back. When I started writing the poems below, Vogel became real to me as a character. The poems are written to her. They address her and beg a response.

Texts & Translation

Lwowska Juderia

Lwów’s Jewish Quarter

Debora Vogel

Translation by Jordan Lee Schnee

Debora Vogel’s 1935 essay, Lwowska Juderia, gives us a valuable snapshot of Lwów’s Jewish streets with an eye to the modern.

Texts & Translation

Erasing the Written, Rewriting the Erased: A Fragmented and Imperfect Tribute to Vogel

Zackary Sholem Berger

Zackary Sholem Berger renders two poems by Vogel anew via the poetic method of translation-erasure, revealing through distortion the contours that lead from language to language across the decades.


Contributors