Writing Jewish Women's Lives: Literary Salon 1

Writing Jewish Women's Lives: Literary Salon 1

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7 November 14:00 to 15:30
The Buttery and Online via Zoom
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Tuesday 7 November, 2pm-3.30pm

The Buttery, Wolfson College and Online via Zoom

Free; open to all

Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women's Lives

At the core of OCLW's new programme on Writing Jewish Women's Lives, our new series of afternoon literary salons are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women. The two sessions in Michaelmas term will be led by author Rebecca Abrams, on the theme 'Into the Darkness, Towards the Light: Jewish women’s lives beyond the Holocaust'.

On 7 November we will dive into a range of literature, with extracts provided as handouts on the day, and shared on-screen via zoom, to aid discussion.

On 21 November we welcome writer and campaigner Natasha Walter who will be in conversation with Rebecca about her new book Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance, which is one of several works that will have been discussed at the first salon. We will also be joined by a bookseller on the 21st, from whom you can buy the book and others relevant to the programme.

You can sign up to one session or both. 

Registration has now closed; if you would still like to attend, please simply come to the Buttery at 2pm or email admin.oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk.

 

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i)               Before the Light Fades by Natasha Walter (Virago 2023)

 

British feminist author Natasha Walter combines memoir and family history in her exploration of the life and troubling legacy of her political activist Jewish mother, and the hidden causes of her death from suicide in her early 50s.

 – published August 2023 – NW’s publicist at Virago is Grace Vincent.

 

ii)              The Lost Café Schindler  by Meriel Schindler (Hodder, 2022)


UK lawyer Meriel Schindler weaves together memoir, family history and an untold story of the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to explore the restorative power of writing and a powerful reflection on memory, truth, and transgenerational trauma.

 

iii)            House of Glass by Hadley Freeman (Fourth Estate, 2020)

 

British journalist Hadley Freeman’s decade-long quest to uncover her grandmother’s life story explores the broad range of experiences of Eastern European Jews during the Holocaust, illuminating Jewish and immigrant experience in the World War II era, and addressing themes of assimilation, identity, and home.

  

iv)            The Postcard by Anne Berest (Europa Editions, 2023)

 

French author and scriptwriter Anne Berest’s family memoir blends fact and imaginative reconstruction as she painstakingly uncovers the fate of her Fren Jewish grandparents and their children in France before and during World War II, and the hidden repercussions for successive generations of Jewish women in her family.

 

v)              Susan Faludi, In the Dark Room (Picador, 2017)

 

American feminist writer Susan Faludi chases the mystery of her elderly and estranged Hungarian-born father’s transformation into a woman through a labyrinth of history and politics that leads from suburban America to Holocaust Budapest and raises the question: is identity something you "choose," or is it the very thing you can't escape?

Rebecca Abrams

Rebecca teaches creative and academic writing at Oxford University, where she is a core tutor on the Masters in Creative Writing and teaches literature and creative writing at Keble College and Wadham College. She is the author of seven works of fiction and non-fiction and a verse play, The Pied Piper of Covid.  Her debut novel, Touching Distance was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize for Literature and won the MJA Open Book Award for Medical Fiction. Her most recent work of non-fiction, The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum, has been described as ‘a celebration of Jewish life in all its worldly immensity - a tribute to the cosmopolitan ideals of Stefan Zweig.’ She is also the co-editor of Jewish Treasures From Oxford Libraries, currently long-listed for the 2021 Wingate Literary Prize.

This year, OCLW's Co-Director Dr Kate Kennedy will be introducing a new programme, focussed on Writing Jewish Women's Lives. It will be launched on Tuesday 17 October 2023 with a full day Colloquium, ending with the film Across the Land and the Water by Barbara Loftus, the painter and film maker, who has retraced the journey of her family to England.

Following the colloquium, the new programme will host regular 'Literary Salons' during Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity terms, inviting speakers to explore and research Jewish women's voices as part of social and cultural history. In Michaelmas 2023, the salons will take place on 7 and 21 November.

This exciting venture is the first at any academic institution in the UK, and possibly abroad. It is open to all -- academics and the general public alike.