Aleksandra Szczepan, “Intimate Cartographies: Mapping Jewish Eastern Europe in Yizker-Bikher”

This talk will explore how Jewish memorial books, yizker-bikher, created by Holocaust survivors or by pre-war Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe, have engaged and encouraged various forms of mappings. These include both material cartographic images published in memorial books and performative acts of mapping the space of Jewish Eastern Europe undertaken by two groups of actors: those who decided to come back and see, among them members of various generations of Jewish families, and those who felt compelled to understand what has been destroyed or rendered invisible in their localities—the non-Jewish residents of former Eastern-European shtetlach.

Aleksandra Szczepan is a post-doctoral researcher in the project “Adjustment and Radicalization: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Eastern Europe” at the University of Potsdam. She is a literary scholar and a co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has also been engaged as a researcher and interviewer in oral history projects undertaken by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Poland, Spain, and Kazakhstan. She has received scholarships from various institutions, including the USHMM, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and the Polish National Science Centre. She is currently working on a book project that proposes thinking about the significance of maps as testimonies in Holocaust research.