About this talk

Join the London launch of Molly Crabapple’s highly anticipated new history of the Bund – once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern Europe. The story of the Jewish Bund was one of the struggle for dignity and equality ‘here where we live’. Crabapple’s great-grandfather Sam Rothbort was one of its members, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust Rothbort created ‘memory paintings’ with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter discovered these paintings, setting her on a journey into the extraordinary, forgotten world of the secular, socialist and anti-Zionist Jewish Bund – its insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, its clandestine revolutionaries and lovers at the barricades. Crabapple’s history interweaves with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust, and the Bund’s rise and fall raises questions still vital for us today as we once again contend with nationalism, repression and the struggle for belonging. Crabapple joins cultural historian, archivist, translator and educator Hazem Jamjoum in conversation. He is the lead editor at Safarjal Press and recently translated Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type.

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