Lea Schäfer Knihy

Frank Gerritz, born in 1964 in Hamburg, is an artist whose ideas literally move in space. Starting from the floor, his work spills onto the wall and, from there, has an effect back into the room. The sculptor works, among other things, on aluminum panels with paintsticks in such dense layers that the surfaces on the one hand appear sealed, yet the structure of the application on the other hand remains visible. Black is not always black; where the silver-anodized aluminum sur­faces reflect the room, the darker parts of the ­surfaces reveal a shimmering, a residue of light that changes depending on the viewpoint and light conditions. The drawn surfaces - graphite pencil or paintstick on MDF boards or aluminum - develop a materiality characterized by blurred reflections, thus transferring the surfaces of the two-dimen­sional image carriers into a spatial dimension. In addition, Gerritz casts iron blocks based on his own body dimensions; their stand area form the basis for his first prints on paper and define the proportions of his sculptural works in front of the wall. The catalog shows the inherent spatiality of the wall objects and sculptural groups and unfolds specific details.

20th century fascism significantly disrupted European Jewish cultures, leading survivors to relocate and partially revitalize their heritage. This upheaval also affected languages, which were either abandoned due to assimilation or altered by new cultural interactions. By the 1950s, it became clear that many survivors would not pass their mother tongue to future generations. Uriel Weinreich recognized the urgent need to document the language and culture of these speakers. His project, “Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry” (LCAAJ), involved 18 interviewers collecting nearly 1,000 interviews from 1959 to 1972 using an extensive questionnaire. The LCAAJ material serves as a vital resource for understanding the historical Yiddish dialects of Central Europe. In 2018, Columbia Libraries published digitized copies of the field notes, making this raw data publicly accessible. Between 2017 and 2022, the “Syntax of Eastern Yiddish Dialects” (SEYD) project analyzed these notes, focusing on syntactic and morphological structures. This volume presents selected findings, emphasizing empirical data within a (micro)typological context, complemented by numerous maps illustrating the grammatical variation across former European Yiddish dialects.