“Echoes of Exile: A Family’s Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War”
A book talk with
Daniela Spenser
September 15
4:00pm
Curti Lounge (5233 Mosse Humanities Building)
455 N. Park St. (Madison, WI)
In her book Echoes of Exile, Daniela Spenser reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Daniela Spenser is a fellow at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City. In addition to Echoes of Exile, she is author of The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s and Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International.
Sponsored by the Department of History, George L. Mosse Program in History, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, Center for German & European Studies, and the Harvey Goldberg Center