This book could be called a collection of reportages about Ukrainian women who document Russian war crimes. It is also a diary, a collection of stories of those who had witnessed and survived the worst terrors of Russian aggression and occupation. At the same time, this book powerfully argues for the fact that the Russian war against Ukraine began much earlier than 2014 and that’s of the utmost importance to remember about Russian terror against Ukrainians in the 1930s and 1960s. This event will gather the protagonists of Victoria Amelina’s unfinished book to share love and memory, to testify and to continue the fight for justice.

How are words that resist translation–words like свої, произвол, перемога–keys for opening locked doors and allowing us into new, unfamiliar spaces? And what can we do with the things we learn by being in those spaces?

Hannah Arendt concludes Origins of Totalitarianism with the remark: “we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” Later, after observing the Eichmann trial, she came to the conclusion that evil could not be radical, it could only be extreme. What she learned from Eichmann, she believed, was that the nature of evil was its shallowness, its lack of depth—in contrast to our longing for the demonic.

Yiddish is being reflected upon anew as a language of Ukraine as the country embraces a civic national identity. What does it mean for Yiddish-Ukrainian literary translation to experience a renaissance in the midst of war?

Can poetry translate suffering–and cultivate empathy–when other forms fail?

“How is translating A. S. Byatt , Susan Sontag or Julian Barnes when a Russian missile strikes a couple blocks away from your place different from translating them when one doesn’t?”— Iaroslava Strikha

Can new material forms shake us into a different connection with the past? Photographer-artists Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac have spent years visiting mass grave sites, collecting organic material, turning it into liquid emulsion, and then using that to reproduce photographs of Holocaust victims–whose bodies are then molecularly present in the images.

Fascism, imperialism, decolonization, genocide, concentration camps all function as hermeneutic concepts and categories allowing for historical comparisons. How can we mediate between the particular and the universal? What kind of understanding and solidarity across borders is possible?