‘It is a worthy project, but […] the public is satiated’: Publishing Holocaust Testimonies from East-Central Europe

Speaker: Dr Joanna Rzepa - Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

In this talk, Joanna Rzepa will examine the translation and publishing history of Holocaust testimonies from East-Central Europe. Exploring the production and circulation of selected survivor narratives since World War II until the fall of the Iron Curtain, she will interrogate British and American publishers’ agendas and editorial practices, which she situates within the broader context of the cultural politics of the Cold War.

The talk will consider censorship regimes that shaped the construction and circulation of testimonial narratives during the Cold War, paying particular attention to the changing political and historical status of the Holocaust in East-Central Europe and globally. It will also bring to light cases of complex publishing trajectories of narratives such as Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto Diary (1945), which – while originally written in Polish – only exist in various translations, retranslations, and backtranslations as the original source texts have never been published and, in some cases, are no longer extant.

About our speaker:
Dr Joanna Rzepa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. Her research interests include translation history, Holocaust writing, and publishing studies.