Teicholz Film Series: Who Will Remain?

Attempting to better understand her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon travels to Lithuania, using her grandfather’s diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust. Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by the New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust”—whose verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel. Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew and must rely on translation of her grandfather’s work, is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy.

Woven into the documentary are family home videos, newly recorded interviews, and archival recordings, including Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trial. Recitation of his poetry and personal reflections on resisting Nazi forces as a partisan fighter reveal how Sutzkever tried to make sense of the Holocaust and its aftermath. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time.

Watch a trailer HERE.

Following the screening is a live conversation and Q&A, moderated by journalist Tom Teicholz and featuring director/producer Christa P. Whitney, and director/film editor Emily Felder. 

Christa P. Whitney is an oral historian and award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on language, culture, and identity. Since 2010, she has traveled near and far in search of Yiddish stories as the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,300 in-depth video interviews. Christa holds a BA from Smith College in Comparative Literature and Dance, and is currently pursuing aMasters in Business Administration with a focus on analytics at the Isenberg School of Management. Christa was named on the 2020 Forward 50 list of “people we needed in a year we definitely didn’t.”

Emily Felder is a film editor whose work has been internationally screened in museums ,libraries, schools, and festivals. She attended the University of Massachusetts where she studied anthropology, journalism, and documentary film. She worked as the premier technical assistant for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, and as an assistant editor at Florentine Films/Hott Productions on feature-length documentaries broadcast on PBS. She is now an editor and videographer based in Los Angeles where she continues to make films.

RSVP HERE