“Hundreds of movies, thousands of books, fiction and non-fiction, as well as thousands of research articles written on the history of the Holocaust, cannot express all the horror of this disaster: that a significant part of Jewish people was exterminated together with their original culture and language. From the ashes of the Holocaust, like the Phoenix, emerged the modern state of Israel, but with its own Israeli culture and a different language. So it is not surprising that one of Russia’s finest poets, Alexander Gorodnitsky, for whom the world is the basis of human communality, sees the disappearance of the Yiddish language, the language of his ancestors for ages, as one of the paramount tragedies of the Holocaust. The documentary In Search of the Yiddish made by Alexander Gorodnitsky, Natalia Kasperovich, Seymon Friedland, and Yuri Khashchevatsky is an attempt to look at the disappearance of the Yiddish language and culture from the poet’s point of view. The mountains of documents stored in museums, libraries, and foundations across the world, cannot possibly express the feeling of a poet confronting the disaster which befell the Yiddish language. The movie is not just a compilation of facts, sometimes tragic, sometimes touching, and sometimes even amusing (like the episode of Yiddish studies by a group of Belarusian enthusiasts); the movie is an expression of pain by a man who has lost his ancestors and their language. All of us born in the USSR and grow up within the great Russian culture gave little thought to the ethnicity of our ancestors, their traditions, religion, and language. We were under strong ideological pressure that converted us into memory-free “mankurts”. And yet, Jewish people in the USSR carefully kept their memory of their rarely see relatives from small shtelts in distant corners of the Russian Empire. Unfortunately, mot everybody possesses those discolored pre-war family photos. With age, one wishes to better understand the life of his parents and grandparents, which seemed to be so uninteresting and boring in our youth. Everyone, upon reaching maturity, changes the attitude towards elders and, as a rule, experiences deep regret for the inability to learn more about them. This regret for the permanent loss of such connections is one of the main themes of the movie. The exceptional poetry of Alexander Gorodnitsky, which has reached philosophical wisdom along with the poet, gives us the chance to share in his feelings and pain. Our congratulations to the crew with the hope there may be a sequel to this.” 

-          Peter Volkovitsky and Elena Schors, scientists, Washington D. C.