Academic Programs

Faculty

 

Madeline G. Levine

Madeline G. Levine is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, as well as Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature. Prof. Levine received her B.A. from Brandeis University (1962) and her M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1971) from Harvard University. She taught in the Program in Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York for three years before coming to UNC in 1974.

Prof. Levine is a specialist in Polish literature and an award-winning literary translator. She teaches courses on modern Russian and Polish literature, comparative East European literature, and literary translation. Her interest in the Jewish experience in Poland and Russia, especially as it has been represented in fiction and poetry by Jewish and non-Jewish authors writing in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, is reflected in both her teaching and her publications. Her regularly offered courses, “Imagined Jews: Jewish Themes in Polish and Russian Literature” (JWST 164/SLAV 164) and “Literature of Atrocity: The Gulag and the Holocaust in Russian and East European Literature” (JWST 165/SLAV 165/PWAD 165), are obviously concerned with the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. Several other courses that she teaches also have a significant Jewish-studies component, for it is impossible to study modern Polish or Russian literature without attention to such major Jewish literary figures as, for example, the Yiddish writer I.B. Singer and the Polish-Jewish prose master Bruno Schulz, whose works are studied in “Twentieth-Century Polish Literature” (JWST 112/PLSH 112), and the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, a central figure in the graduate seminar, “Post-Symbolist Poetry” (RUSS 267).

Works translated by Prof. Levine that explore the lives of Jews in Poland include Polish-Israeli writer Ida Fink's short stories about the Holocaust, collected in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1987); Bogdan Wojdowski's harrowing autobiographical novel of childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, Bread for the Departed (1997); and Agata Tuszynska's meditative reportage, Landscapes of Memory: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland (1998). A translated collection of stories by Hanna Krall, a writer whose themes spring from her own experience as a hidden child during the Holocaust, is forthcoming in 2005 under the title The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories. Several of Levine's scholarly articles on Polish-Jewish themes have been translated into Polish for publication in Poland.

Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
JWST 164/SLAV 164. “Jews in Polish and Russian Literature”
JWST 165/SLAV 165/PWAD165. “Literature of Atrocity: The Gulag and the Holocaust in Russian and East European Literature”