Family Affairs: Writings Parents' Stories

In the fourth program of the series, Bernice Lerner, author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins, 2020) and Susan Jacobowitz, author of the manuscript Far from Childhood: A Holocaust Memoir, discuss with Natalia Aleksiun their parents' interrupted childhoods during the Holocaust in the Carpathian Mountains. The authors reflect on their work uncovering the life trajectories of Rachel Genuth and Henryk Jakobowicz and the link between their own familiarity with and distance from the stories. They share insights about the role of their own scholarship and writing about intimate tales of suffering, rupture, continuity, and courage. Nasaw shares this history in a wide-ranging conversation with Atina Grossmann, author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press) and Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union, whose research relates to transnational Jewish refugee stories. This program was funded, in part, by a Humanities New York CARES Grant, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. This event took place on Wednesday, March 24, 2021.

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