The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation

This event will bring prize-winning American author Louise Steinman together in conversation with historian of the Holocaust in Poland, Dr Joanna Michlic. In the winter of 2000 Louise set out to Auschwitz to learn more about the ancestors that were killed in Holocaust in Poland. Her research led her to her grandparent's town of Radomsko, where eighteen thousand Jews were deported or shot during the occupation. Her book describes the process of uncovering the past of the lost community of Jews of the town, and questions what reconciliation means in the context of Polish and Jewish life today. Louise Steinman is the author of the award-winning memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. She curates the ALOUD literary and performance series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and codirects the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California. Joanna Michlic, Lecturer in Contemporary History at Bristol University, is an historian whose research has focused on the Holocaust in Poland in its social and cultural dimensions. She is particularly interested in areas relating to gender, childhood, and individual and collective memories of traumatic and dark pasts, such as in the case of the Holocaust. Her most recent edited essay collection (with John-Paul Himka of Alberta University, Canada) Bringing the Dark to Light: The Memory of the Holocaust in Post-communist Europe captures the diverse and dynamic ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and interpreted in post-communist countries.

Suitable for
18+

Admission
free but booking essential as space is limited

Website
http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Whats-On?item=155

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//am52233?id=EVENT506223