This talk traces a family-rooted genealogy of the sukkah as a fragile Jewish architecture of vulnerability and survival in the face of catastrophe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on the sukkah as a structure of ethical exposure and responsibility, Li Shir examines its afterlives as a mnemonic placeholder and ethical figure through its transformations across her family’s history.

This mnemonic history begins with an indoor sukkah with a hinged roof in her grandfather’s childhood home in Skarżysko-Kamienna. This sukkah in a Polish shtetl in the 1930s came to figure centrally in his memory work because it was on Sukkot 1942 that his family and hometown were liquidated by the Nazis. The second sukkah appears on the title page of the Skarżysko Yizkor Book as a figure of destruction, echoing the function of memorial books themselves as tombstones of paper. The third sukkah, photographed in a DP camp in occupied Berlin in 1946, marks a personal triumph and secular re-enactment of the sukkah’s mystical role as a meeting place between the dead and the living.

The fourth figuration, the Charred Sukkah, continues the affective synchronicities of Sukkot within Li Shir’s family history through her own artwork. Created in the aftermath of October 7, which also occurred on Shemini Atzeret, it echoes the deserted sukkahs left standing during the war. This final image brings the sukkah into the present, raising questions about belonging, vulnerability, and the ethical demands of the past in the present.

The speaker:

Li Shir is an artist and a transdisciplinary scholar in memory studies, specialising in the English Renaissance. Her PhD dissertation, Death in Sheep’s Clothing: Pastoral Poetics of Death from Arcadia to Auschwitz, traced revivals of a topos Erwin Panofsky termed the “Tomb in Arcadia,” from classical poetry to early modern pastorals to representations of the Holocaust. Her current research documents and analyses the memory work of her grandfather, Abraham Shayer (1923–1998), a Holocaust survivor from Skarżysko-Kamienna in Poland, through his unfinished memoirs and the Holocaust artefacts he created. She currently teaches English Literature at Beit Berl College in Israel.

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Funded by:

Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert aus Steuermitteln auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.