The Case Against Rubinstein: Redactions & Fissures in a Fascist Aesthetic

Helen Betya Rubinstein's essays and fiction have appeared in venues including Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, and Jewish Currents, where she is a contributing writer. Her book Feels Like Trouble: Transgressive Takes on Teaching, Writing, and Publishing is forthcoming, and her chapbook Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song is available. She is at work on several nonfiction projects that subvert conventions of narrative, stage divergent voices in conversation, and use the personal as a prism for investigating questions of social and political consequence. As part-time faculty at Lang College, Helen works with first-year and transfer students to approach writing and scholarship using anti-oppressive strategies. She also has an active practice as a writing coach.

In her GIDEST presentation, Helen will talk about the visual treatment of pages of a Soviet case file against her grandfather for his work as leader of a Jewish community in occupied Ukraine during World War II. Without failing to convey their original function, the goal of this visual-textual intervention will be to refuse the historical and narrative violences they commit, and thereby to reclaim or remake their meaning. These images will form the visual and conceptual anchor of Helen's book-in-progress, a case against herself for the crime of telling a story about the Soviet case against her grandfather. Bringing together personal narrative and researched history, the project considers the impact of U.S. and Soviet policy on collective memory, family relationships, and the historical record.