Event

Why do some writers about the Shoah become widely read and globally recognized, while others are ignored? In this talk, we will explore the belated literary and moral legacy of H. G. Adler, a Czech-born German Jewish writer of astonishing literary range and volume. Neglected for over half a century, Adler’s masterful novels burst onto the literary scene in the current millennium. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald, Adler produced a vast and complex body of writing, but remained little known during his lifetime. In total, he published 26 books of fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, and social science and 158 essays and radio plays. In thinking about Adler’s neglect and belated recover, we will also consider the shifting evolution of literary memory canons.

Sara R. Horowitz is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Voicing the Void:  Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and served as the senior editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs - Canada (Series 1 and 2). She is the editor of Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Volume X: Back to the Sources (2012), and co-editor (with Julia Creet and Amira Dan) of Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016), of Encounter with Appelfeld (with Michael Brown), and other books.  In addition, she is founding co-editor of the journal KEREM:  A Journal of Creative Explorations in Judaism. She served as editor for Literature for The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture (ed. Judith Baskin). She publishes extensively on contemporary Holocaust literature, gender and Holocaust memory survivors, and Jewish North American fiction, and writes a monthly column for the Canadian Jewish News. She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, sits on the Academic Advisory Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Academic Advisory Council of the Holocaust Education Foundation. Currently, she is completing a book called “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory,” and working on a book called “Jewish Shadows on the City of Lights:  The Image of Paris in Post-Holocaust Writing.”   

Co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures.

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary. 

For more information: E-Mail jsp-info@sas.upenn.edu or Call 215-898-6654