CAFÉ EUROPA

Literary cafes nurtured the diversity of European cultural life in the 19th and early 20th century… cozy, smoky places humming with artists’ and writers’ views on life philosophies, art manifestos, and issues of the day. Such places are virtually extinct, yet the need for them has not disappeared.

Gdzies na rozstajnych drogach Czasu musi istniec "Cafe Europe"... kogo tam nie ma...

Somewhere on the crossroads of Time there must be a Cafe Europa... And of course, everybody’s there...                                – Tadeusz Kantor

Recognizing this need, especially at a time when many felt the horror of the war in Bosnia and the crushing of multiculturalism as symbolized by Sarajevo, Czyzewski came up with the idea of a “flying literary cafe”. Meetings of writers from both the former communist countries and the West have been held from Sejny to Saragossa, from Sarajevo to Stockholm, from Bucharest to Iowa, addressing the contemporary crisis of multiculturalism in the West.


VYT BAKAITIS (b. 1940) is a Lithuanian-born poet and translator living in New York since 1968. He has published a book of poems, City Country (1991), and three books of his translations: There is No Ithaca by poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, with a preface by Czeslaw Milosz (1996); Breathing Free / Gyvas Atodusis (2001), a broad bilingual selection of the best contemporary Lithuanian verse; and XL Poems by Julius Keleras (2002). His translations of poems by Holderlin, Mickiewicz, and Tomas Venclova are included in a Norton anthology, World Poetry (1998).
(photo: Elena Floris)


CARMEN FIRAN published several books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories in her native Romania. In New York since 2000, her writings appear in translation in literary magazines and anthologies internationally. Her recent books in the U.S. include The Second Life (2006), The Farce (2002), and she has co-edited two anthologies of American and Romanian poetry. A member of PEN American Center, she is on the editorial board of Lettre Internationale (Paris). It took a survivor of Eastern European tyranny… to reveal the true absurdity of the American story. – Bruce Benderson, author of User


ANNA FRAJLICH is senior lecturer in Slavic languages at Columbia University, a Polish poet who left after the 1968 anti-Jewish campaign, and author of eleven volumes of poetry, including the bilingual Between Dawn and the Wind. Her work reflects her struggles as a woman, immigrant, and Polish ex-patriot. She has received the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Literary Award. Her recent publications include an interview in Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations (2006). …Anna from Brooklyn is a poetess of exile – Jan Kott


EVA HOFFMAN emigrated from Poland to Canada and then the USA in her teens, an experience captured in her acclaimed Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). A former New York Times senior editor and literary critic, she has also written Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997), and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). She lectures internationally on issues of exile, memory, Polish-Jewish history; taught literature and creative writing at MIT, Tufts, and Columbia; won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Whiting Award for Writing. Now based in London, she is Visiting Professor at Hunter College, CUNY.


VASYL MAKHNO (b. 1964) is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, and translator, author of six volumes of poems, as well as translations into Ukrainian of such poets as Poland’s Zbigniew Herbert. He taught Ukrainian at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and was published in Polish translation. His emigration to the U.S. in 2000 led to a fundamental change in Makhno's work as shown in his most recent collection, 38 Poems About New York and Some Other Things (Kiev 2004), about the boundaries of the Ukrainian ghetto, poetry as gift or craft, and Western tradition vs. Eastern canon.


MICHAEL ALPERT (voice, accordion, violin, guitar, percussion), pioneer in the revival of East European Jewish klezmer music for over 25 years, is internationally known for his performances and award-winning recordings with Brave Old World, Khevrisa, Kapelye, and David Krakauer. He is considered the finest traditional Yiddish singer of his generation, noted for his original Yiddish songs on contemporary themes. Adept at 20 languages and recognized for his command of ethnic vocal styles from Russian to Mexican, he has toured North America, Europe, Israel, Australia. A leading researcher of Jewish traditional music and dance, he has taught or lectured on East European ethnomusicology and cultural history at Columbia, Oxford, Yale, UCLA, University of Mainz, and more. He is co-founder of “Buffalo on the Roof”, exploring links between Jewish and non-Jewish folk traditions of East Europe, program director of KlezKanada, and artistic consultant to the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland.