[Libri] Center for the Book events at Hampshire College

[der Geist, der stets verneint]

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us for the following events at the beginning of October.

Jim Wald
(for the Center for the Book)



"Endangered Words"
Three events, featuring author, playwright, poet, translator Peter  
Wortsman
(in collaboration with printmaker-sculptor Harold Wortsman)


  Author, playwright, poet, translator Peter Wortsman, who visited  
Hampshire College as a scholar in residence in November 2002, will make  
a three-day repeat appearance at Hampshire this fall.

  Saturday, October 2, 2004, Hampshire College, Franklin Patterson Hall,  
West Lecture Hall, 7:30 p.m.

“Orpheus Raising Hell: Memories of the Late Aleksander Kulisiewicz,  
survivor-singer of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” a talk  
interspersed with taped music.
Author Peter Wortsman will speak on the singular achievements of the  
late Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a modern day Orpheus, troubadour of the  
unutterable at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where he was interned  
for five years. There he wrote and surreptitiously performed 51 songs  
and also collected the poems and songs of fellow inmates, saving their  
words and music from extinction. From a hospital bed after the War he  
dictated 617 pages of remembered songs which he subsequently performed  
on concert stages around the world. These songs became the core of a  
huge archive of music and poetry from the Nazi concentration camps, now  
a special collection at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in  
Washington D.C.. The speaker was privileged to meet and interview the  
singer and to count him as a friend. These remarks were originally  
commissioned by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for a website  
devoted to the singer’s memory.


  Sunday, October 3, 2004, Reading Room of the Massachusetts Center for  
Renaissance Studies, 650 East Pleasant Street, Amherst 3:00 p.m.
Hampshire College and the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies  
co-sponsor
a staged reading of excerpts from “Burning Words, a history play,” by  
Peter Wortsman. The reading will be presented by the Center’s  
Renaissance Theatre Company under the direction of Adam Sanders. Mr.  
Wortsman will introduce the play.

  “Burning Words,” a 16-character play, recounts the turbulent life and  
times of German Humanist Johannes Reuchlin, whose historic defense of  
the Talmud and courageous stand against ignorance and intolerance split  
16th-century Europe wide open and helped wrench Christendom out of the  
Dark Ages.  The play pits Reuchlin against his nemesis, the Papal  
Inquisitor Jacob von Hoogsträten and the latter’s cohorts, Johannes  
Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert turned Christian bull dog, and Kunigunde  
von Bayern, the temperamental sister of Emperor Maximilian I. There are  
evident echoes of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” and Robert Bolt’s  
“A Man for All Seasons.” Beyond its historical import, the play  
resonates in these times of intolerance and surging fundamentalism.


  Monday, October 4, 2004, Hampshire College Gallery (ground floor of  
the Library Center), 5:30 p.m.
A launch and presentation of it-t=i, an artists book, etchings by  
Harold Wortsman, texts by Peter Wortsman
A unique artistic dialogue between brothers, it-t=i is a joint  
exploration in word and image of the “personality” of the inanimate and  
the insensate that underlies each I.

  Peter Wortsman
Saluted as a “20th-century Brother Grimm” (Bloomsbury Review) and “a  
delinquent Hans Christian Andersen” (playwright Mark O’Donnell), Peter  
Wortsman is the recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and  
fellowships from the Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Foundations. He has  
published in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way To Die,  
1991), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All, 2000) and  
translation(Posthumous Papers by a Living Author, by Robert Musil,  
1988, reissued by Penguin 20th Century Classics, and the forthcoming  
“Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose Pearls of Peter Altenberg”). His  
work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe.  
His interviews with survivors of the Nazi concentration camps comprise  
“The Peter Wortsman Collection” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum  
in Washington D.C.

  Harold Wortsman
Harold Wortsman is a printmaker and sculptor based in New York. He  
“creates forms that bring to mind archaic cult objects and exude a  
quiet concentrated strength.” (Argauer Zeitung, Switzerland). His work,  
“an edgy mix of freedom and clarity” (Anne-Marie Dannenberg, former  
director Dannenberg Gallery, NYC), can be found in public and private  
collections in the US and Europe as well as such American institutions  
as The New York Public Library Print Collection (NYC) , the Jane  
Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum Print Archive (Rutgers University), Smith  
College and Brandeis University. His book cover designs with  
accompanying original art, were the subject of a solo show at Books &  
Co. (NYC 1993). The Schweizerische Gesellschaft für  
Original-Druckgrafik, Zürich, has published his etchings.


NOTE:  Our website includes these descriptions as well as sample text  
and an image from "it-t=i":

http://www.hampshire.edu/center4book/what%27snew/wortsman.html

Sponsors:  Hampshire College Center for the Book, the Massachusetts  
Center for Renaissance Studies, Hampshire College Jewish Studies, and  
Amherst and Mount Holyoke College German Studies Departments

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