The Breman Museum will present poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris in a program coinciding with Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 18.
Jewish poet Kaminsky has been an important voice on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict since Russia invaded his homeland a year ago and his poem, We Lived Happily During the War, went viral. The poem is from his collection Deaf Republic, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in poetry.
“Poetry now is as necessary as ever — not because it is pretty or fancy but because it helps us to articulate the most impossible moments: It gives us a gasp, a scrap of air in our lungs,” Kamisky told Atlanta Magazine last year. “When we have nothing else, we can still hold a handful of words in our memory, a tune, and that might be all we have got now to survive — we don’t know yet. But if we are lucky, it is there, stored in our memories.”
Kaminsky, whose reading on April 18 will include We Lived Happily During the War, was selected by the BBC as one of the “12 artists that changed the world” in 2019.
Meanwhile, his wife, poet Katie Farris, has been immersed in a struggle of a more personal sort, with breast cancer. She intially wrote about her diagnosis and treatment in the award-winning, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving.
“Katie’s war zone is her own body,” Kaminsky said “Her bravery and her ability to find music and vivid imagery and stories from the intensity of her waiting is so much more crucial than mine can ever be. I am watching her in awe.”
In her poem Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World, published late last year on Granta.com, Farris wrote:
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
Farris and Kaminsky will do a book signing, including Farris’ just-published collection Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, following their reading.
The Breman and partners will present the 58th Annual Community-wide Yom HaShoah Commemoration at 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 16, at the “Memorial to the Six Million” monument at Greenwood Cemetery. The featured speaker will be Holocaust survivor Ilse Eichner Reiner, who as a child in Czechoslovakia was sent to the ghetto and then Theresienstadt concentration camp. With great resilience, she became one of only 100 of 15,000 child prisoners who survived the camp.
In honor of Yom HaShoah, the Breman Museum’s exhibition “Absence of Humanity: The Holocaust Years, 1933-1945” will be open free to the public from 11AM to 4PM Sunday, April 16.
For more information, visit www.thebreman.org/Events or call (678) 222-3700.
