Tombs: Writing One's Family History

Book talk by Annette Wieviorka, French historian and specialist of the Holocaust

Tuesday, April 11, 2023
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM (Pacific Time)

Royce Hall 236

The UCLA Department for European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) in co-sponsorship with the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies (CERS), and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies invite you to Tombs: Writing One's Family History, a book talk by Annette Wieviorka, French historian and specialist of the Holocaust. The event will take place in person on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 5pm in Royce Hall 236.

Abstract

Is it possible to be the historian of one's own family, when one already serves as its archive? What resources exist to enable this undertaking? How might one craft a story from it all? In her talk, Annette Wieviorka will discuss these and related questions, which she grappled with herself upon deciding to tell the intersecting (hi)stories of her maternal and paternal forebears, Jewish immigrants from Poland to France in the aftermath of the Great War.

Speaker

Annette Wieviorka is a major French historian, specialist of the Holocaust. She opened a new field about collective memory and the importance of testimony over history. Her work includes, in English, The Era of the Witness (Cornell University Press, 2006). Her last book, Tombeaux. Autobiographie de ma famille (Seuil, 2022) was awarded the Femina Prize for non-fiction.

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies