The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"I Asked Permission to Take a Piece of Grass”: Visiting Ponar

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Jordan Kutzik, translator and Yiddishist, describes his emotionally harrowing trip to Ponar, the site of a mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. During the trip, he remembered Avrom Sutzkever's poem, “A Blade of Grass from Ponar”.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Jordan Kutzik.

This excerpt is in English.

Jordan Kutzik was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1988.

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This interview is part of the Yiddish in the Academy: scholars, language instructors, and students series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

A Philadephia Workmen's Circle Secular Bar Mitzvah

2 min 45 sec

Yungtruf: A Call to Yiddish Youth

5 min 53 sec

I Showed Up In A Green Suit: Yiddish Fieldwork in Hasidic Communities

4 min 53 sec

Studying Yiddish in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania"

3 min 45 sec

“You End Up Overshadowing 1000 Years of History”: A Sense of Duty to Spread Yiddish

2 min 47 sec

Reconnecting Kaczerginski and Botwinik through A Reel-to-Reel Tape from Montréal

5 min 1 sec

The Role of Yiddish Organizations in the Present and Future of the Language and Culture

3 min 46 sec

Is There A Yiddish Revival?

3 min 10 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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