In Memoriam: Svetlana Boym, a prolific Jewish Scholar, Writer, and Artist, Died This Week in Boston.
Svetlana Boym—an inspiring professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, an engaging and original thinker, a writer and artist, a fellow immigrant, a member of my dissertation committee, a kind person, one of the liveliest human beings I’ve met—died earlier this week, on August 5, in Boston. I write these words thinking of her and also about friends in the small circle of people around her in her final months—people who took care of her, engaged her in conversation, read her latest work, knew that she was dying. They, together with Svetlana’s parents who are now saddled with unimaginable grief of outliving their only child, are the mourners; I would be an interloper to count myself among them. I am part of a much larger circle of people Svetlana touched as her students, friends, colleagues, readers of her work. But there is much mourning to be done for us, too; as details of conversations, meals and coffees, of being mentored by her over the years come into sharper relief, I am especially grateful for the opportunity to mourn with the guidance of her texts.
The news of Svetlana’s death reached me in Amherst, Mass., teaching at the week-long Great Jewish Books program, at the Yiddish Book Center. I had just taught the first half of Amos Oz’s The Hill of Evil Counsel to the participants in the program, who are all high school juniors and seniors. Set in Jerusalem in 1946, the story dwells, in painstaking detail, on the brokenness of lives of Jewish immigrants to Mandate Palestine, on their arrival to a place that was permeated, as the story repeatedly reminds us, by the smell of garbage, and by tension just beneath the veneer of the “holy city.” The protagonists are haunted by nostalgias for their pasts elsewhere, crying at night in their alien mother tongues.