Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz

From David Kessler

Dear Marianne, and Leo
I finally finished reading. I enjoyed it a lot, Such an impressive undertaking! So well written so moving, eloquent, and flowing.  I think you managed to take this particular place and make it  and what happened there something of universal interest.
I was a bit concerned that it will be too “academically”  oriented and thus maybe detached and even dry but I found the total opposite.
So thanks and congratulations!
 
L, Dave

From Laura Levitt

Dear Marianne and Leo,

I wanted to write and tell you how moved I was reading your new book. It is an extraordinary text. In many ways it is Marianne’s Hotel Bolivia but also different. As a joint effort, indeed, a collective effort, it makes vivid and compelling the challenges of engaging in postmemory especially in relation to this most complicated place. Here postmemory for the second generation is  a profoundly indirect and deeply mediated project. Czernowitz is multiply deferred making access that much more difficult. It was already lost as your parents lived it. The book does not shy away from all of these complications but instead brings readers into the intricacies of these multilayered stories of the past and an ever changing present.

What you do in showing all of this is truly beautiful and compelling.  I loved the movements back and forth from various pasts to and between different presents, and the ways the stories keep changing. My hope is to teach a small piece of the book in my Judaism graduate seminar in the fall just to help complicate what our graduate students in religion understand about the shifting borders, boundaries, languages and cultures of European Jewish life.

Laura

Video Link: Czernowitz in Jewish Memory 3/8

http://www.cjh.org/programs/programarchives.php?vid=20100308czernowitz.mp4

 On the evening of March 8, the two of us, together with Susannah Heschel, scholar of Jewish culture and a descendant of Hasidic rabbinic families from Sadagora, Norman Manea, Romanian-born author of Hooligan’s Return, and Boris Sandler, editor of the Yiddish Forverts and author/producer of a new documentary on Yiddish Czernowitz, spoke on a panel inspired by our book and titled “Czernowitz in Jewish Memory.”  Historian Atina Grossman moderated.

 The program took place at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and was sponsored by the CJH, the Leo Baeck Institute, and YIVO. The Austrian Cultural Forum of New York, Consulate General of Romania, and the Ukrainian Institute of America were our co-sponsors.

GHOSTS OF HOME IN NASHVILLE 3/17

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer conjure the Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

3/17/2010

7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Contact:

Jay Geller

URL:

http://www.ghostsofhome.com

Location:

Sherith Israel Synagogue (3600 West End Avenue @ Bowling Ave.) 

Category:

Open to the Public

Co-sponsored by VU Program in Jewish Studies. For additional information, please contact Lynne Perler @ (615) 322-5029.

March 8, 6:30: Center for Jewish History

Center for Jewish History, Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO present:

Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

Co-sponsored by Austrian Cultural Forum of New York, Consulate General of Romania and Ukrainian Institute of America

 
Panel Discussion Czernowitz--"Vienna of the East"--is the site of two different powerful memories. To some, it was home to a celebrated assimilationist Austro-German Jewish culture; to others, it was a hub for the dynamic creation of modern Yiddish language, literature and Hassidic rabbinic dynasties. A distinguished panel of historians and writers will discuss the legacy of this major Eastern European urban center of Jewish cultural life, and illuminate facets of Jewish identity in urban Jewish communities within the broader history of Jewish emancipation, assimilation and resistance in East and Central Europe. The program will include the screening of a new film, 'Glimpses of Yiddish Czernowitz.'

Speakers:
· Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, authors of Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory
· Susannah Heschel, scholar of modern Judaism, descendant of rabbinic families from the Czernowitz region
· Norman Manea, Romanian-born writer and professor of European Studies and Culture
· Boris Sandler, editor of the Yiddish Forverts and author and producer of the documentary film Glimpses of Yiddish Czernowitz
· Atina Grossmann, scholar of modern German and European history, Moderator

More details on the program and full bios for the speakers can be found at www.cjh.org/czernowitz.

A wine reception will follow the program.

 Admission:
$15 general, $10 CJH, LBI, YIVO members, $5 students
 
For all reservations and inquiries, please call SmartTix
at 212-868-4444
or visit www.smarttix.com.
 
Center for Jewish History Programs
www.programs.cjh.org

From Edith Nichols

It was in desperation that I began reading "Ghosts of Home: The After Life of Czernowitz in Jewish Memeory." My 101-year-old father was suffering from a deep depression. The woman he'd shared his life with for seven years had died, leaving him bereft, nearly blind and terribly hearing-impaired. My father, a cultured former physician who'd left New York City in the 1930s to go to medical school in Vienna and who still spoke Yiddish and German fluently was stricken by the fact that he'd simply lived too long. He sat on his sofa sighing, speaking little and wanting only to die. And yet his intellect remained intact. Lost for any way to help, I suddenly remembered this Hirsch-Spitzer volume that my husband had brought home about the Jewish culture that once thrived in Czernowitz. Why not try reading it aloud to my father? I knew he'd been in Czernowitz twice during his years of study in Vienna when he visited his grandmother and aunts who'd never left the schtetl in Rumania. He'd spoken to me often of that marvelous city, its thriving markets, its smells of roasting eggplant and its beautiful main street. And so I began reading. And suddenly, my father came alive. He began talking and smiling again as this beautifully written book, full of history and images, stirred his memories of a far off past and revived his interest in the present.