Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Israel? Historical Revisionism & Artists of the 1.5 Generation

26 Mar 2019 - 16:00 / 26 Mar 2019 - 18:00

You are cordially invited to a talk by Comparative Literature’s postdoctoral fellow Alex Moshkin. The talk will focus on contemporary Israeli poetry and visual art by the younger generation of Russian émigré artists to Israel. Moshkin explores the surprising presence of nostalgia in these works, which resist dominant Cold War-era portrayals of Jewish life in the USSR. At the same time, he argues, this “nostalgia for communism” derives from the suffering, humiliation, and rapid downward social mobility that many Russian-speaking émigrés experienced in Israel in the 1990s.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019, 4 p.m.
Victoria College, Room VC 212
91 Charles street west Toronto
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Alex Moshkin received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto working on a research project entitled “Minor Geographies: Russian Émigrés, the Literature of Deterritorialization and Spatial Politics in Israel.”