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What a gift to walk to the rivers’ meeting point in Kaunas, which Meyshe Kulbak described in his poetry, and to wander that city’s vaunted, haunted streets…And there was massacre, there, and there was torture, and there was death and pain and humiliation. But there was also life, with all its intricacies and intimacies and idiosyncrasies, and to get to remember and learn about this life felt like something wild and joyous and radical and powerful and good.

Moriel Rothman-Zecherauthor of Sadness is a White Bird

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There was a moment during our trip where I realized, I am filling in the spaces! The tropes came to life, reality replacing mythology. People often say, why would you want to go to Poland? There is nothing there. And yet, there is so much there there. And the there is a direct reflection of how we look, how we inhabit space, to actually get on the ground and smell the summer in a former Jewish space.

Alexx ShillingLos Angeles–based movement artist

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The freedom of that space cultivated by the Helix Fellowship was the freedom of history and land and language to be merely or excessively touching and odd and, at times, impenetrable and meaningless. Which is to say, the freedom to be.

Corbin AllardiceUniversity of Chicago ’18

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Sitting under the willow trees by the Bug River outside the Brest fortress reading about the childhood games and everyday experiences of a Jewish girl who lived in the area almost a century previously. The immediacy of that description of her drinking vinegar—just the way I love to drink pickle juice—made history collapse, fold across the line between those two dots of commonality. I realized the eternal nature of human idiosyncrasy.

Christa Whitneydirector of the Wexler Oral History Project at the Yiddish Book Center

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Throughout our journey I felt as though we were accompanied by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, his sad eyes set backwards, searching with us in the rubble for something to fix and try to bring back to life, even if only for a split second. But our trip was different in an important regard: through the power of poetry, song and art, we had the opportunity to experience these crystallized moments of history in all their horror and beauty, as a group. The power of human creativity was channelled throughout the trip, and, almost miraculously, allowed us to resist, albeit temporarily, the winds blowing from paradise, to stop and think, or feel, or simply be.

Itamar ManoffPhD student, University of British Columbia | founding member, This is not an Ulpan

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All of this cultural exploration, of course, presents us with questions which are just waiting to be investigated: Who were these writers writing for? What is the political significance of their work? Their language? How might they have been influenced by current social trends? The exploration of these difficult yet vital questions was a part of Yiddish that, for whatever reason, seemed to have eluded me. Helix not only brought many of these issues to the fore for me, it made them tangible.

Max EdwardsHarvard Divinity School ‘15

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Finding traces of Jewish history and culture felt central to the Helix experience. Maps, ruins, and monuments became our daily focus. But throughout, I came to realise that there is as much significance in not finding these traces. In omissions, and things lost. This was the case for physical evidence of Jewish habitation in various places in Belarus and Poland, or for contemporary Jewish community in these places. And for me, it was also in finding, or not finding, evidence of queer community and art in these places. And in discovering cyclical histories of politics, trauma, oppression, and art. The Helix Fellowship teaches us that history doesn’t move in a straight and uncomplicated trajectory.

Nicola HearnAustralian filmmaker, musician, and painter

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I returned home with my views fundamentally changed on Yiddish culture and its attendant history because of the sustaining and validating environment in which I learned, discussed, argued and sang about it. The world that informed so much of my work as performer in Yiddish had always seemed so distant—both in time and in space. It now felt like something I was in the midst of, if I knew where and how to look. The milieus that created the poetry that I sang so often (Rosenfeld, Reyzen, Kharik, Fefer) felt—somehow—adjacent to the milieu of artists, performers, students and scholars that I had found in two weeks in Southern California. They couldn’t know us, but we had begun to feel like we knew something of them and their world.

Anthony RussellSinger and musician

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Now the timeline of history appears to be more a series of concentric circles on a wide plane, overlapping one another. When I finally traveled as a fellow, I could feel this non-linear construction of time. I felt it as we pushed our way through overgrown cemeteries or when we entered into an old synagogue to find it had been repurposed as a jazz performance space.

Lydia IvanovicSmith College ’19