Writing Jewish Women’s Lives (seminar 2): Lisa Appignanesi with Devorah Baum

Lisa Appignanesi and Devorah Baum:
Losing the Dead and Other Writerly Intimacies

Tuesday 13 February, 2pm-3.30pm

The Buttery, Wolfson College and Online via Zoom

Free; open to all - registration has now closed, but please come along to Wolfson College at 2pm, or email admin.oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk for the link.

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 seminars are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women. At this seminar we welcome authors Lisa Appignanesi and Devorah Baum to talk about loss and grief, love and laughter, and being Jewish.

Losing the Dead is Lisa’s profound memoir of the time she returned to Poland on a quest to seek out her mother’s wartime secrets at the very moment when her mother’s own memory was getting lost to Alzheimer’s. In so doing, Lisa was led to reflect on the secrets of her own past and identity formations. Devorah, who happens to be Lisa's daughter-in-law, draws on some related tropes of memoir and psychoanalysis in her writing and film-making. In this conversation, Lisa and Devorah will discuss Losing the Dead and then, more generally, the role played by familial stories in their work.

Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSL has written many books, fiction and non-fiction, including the memoirs  Losing the Dead and  Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love.  She has been Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English Pen, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

Devorah Baum is a writer and filmmaker and an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. With Josh Appignanesi she co-directed the feature films The New Man and Husband. She is the author of three books, Feeling Jewish, The Jewish Joke and On Marriage.