Wyman Institute Update: December 19, 2003
- Welcome to the newest member of the Wyman Institute’s Arts & Letters Council:
Lore Segal has worked as novelist, essayist, translator, and writer of children’s books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowments for the Arts, and the Humanities. Her reviews appear in the New York Times Book Review and her stories in the New Yorker. Her story “The Reverse Bug” was included in Best American Short Stories, 1989 and won a prize in in Prize Stories 1990, The O.Henry Awards.
Among Lore Segal’s childrens’ books are Tell me a Mitzi and Tell me a Trudy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970 and 1979 respectively.) and The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat (Knopf, 1985). She translated Gallows Songs with W.D. Snodgrass (Michigan University Press, 1959), The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm with illustrations by Maurice Sendak (Farrar, Straus, 1978), The Book of Adam to Moses (Knopf, 1987) and The Story of King Saul and King David, (Schocken, 1991.)
Lore Segal’s first novel, Other People’s Houses (Harcourt Brace and Giroux, 1964) was serialized in The New Yorker; Luci-nella was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1978, and Her First American, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, by Knopf in 1985.
Between 1968 and 1978, Lore taught writing at the Columbia University’s School of the Arts, at Princeton, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State from which she retired in 1996.
- Academic Council member Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, authored a chapter titled “Transfusing Memory: Second Generation Postmemory in Elie Wiesel’s ‘The Forgotten,'” in ‘Text, Kontext und Fremdspracheuntericht.’ (Peter Lang, 2003)
- Arts & Letters Council member Ted Solotaroff recently edited Alfred Kazin’s ‘America: Literary and Personal Writings.’ In the editor’s introduction, he noted:”In 1943, while he was at the New Republic, [Kazin] had reprinted in its pages with his own commentary a letter from the New York Times written by Shmuel Ziegelboim, an official of the Polish government-in-exile, explaining why the continuing indifference of the West to the destruction of his people left him with no other recourse than that of joining them by taking his life. Heartbreaking in its calm despair, the letter lodged in Kazin’s memory as the voice that personalized the six million, along with his cousin in Poland who was shot dead on her doorstep. From then on he kept close track of ‘the murder of my people’ and found that ‘nothing had so unhinged me from my old “progressivist” belief.'”
- Arts & Letters Council member Michael Moorcock has authored a review-essay, “Learning to Be a Jew,” which will appear in the February-March 2004 issue of The London Magazine. Commenting on Martin Gilbert’s new book, Letters to Auntie Fori, Moorcock offers a personal anecdote recounting how he came to write his own series of Holocaust-related novels. His Pyat ‘Holocaust’ tetralogy goes from 1900 to 1977, the lifetime of the central character, an antisemitic, self-deceiving, self-inventing Jew who goes through the Russian pogroms, revolution, and civil war to wind up in Dachau before, in the confusion of the Spanish civil war, he is ‘accidentally’ shipped to Britain. (The novels are Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, and The Vengeance of Rome.)
- Academic Council member Prof. Joseph Ansell spoke in December at the Polish Embassy in London, on “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Arthur Szyk’s Haggadah for Passover.” His presentation was part of a one-day conference sponsored by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies. It coincided with the publication (by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) of the newest volume of ‘Polin.’Prof. Ansell’s book ‘Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole’, will be published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization next year. This first full-length biography of Szyk will explore, among other subjects, Szyk’s role in the Bergson group and his illustrations for Bergson newspaper advertisements that helped raise American public awareness of the Holocaust.
- The College of William and Mary has just published ‘The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film’, edited by Wyman Institute Academic Council member Prof. Marc L. Raphael. Ordering information is available from mlraph@wm.edu
- On November 2, 2003, Academic Council member Dr. Rochelle L. Millen (Wittenberg University) was one of three panelists at a symposium co-sponsored by the Houston Holocaust Museum and the Melancthon Institute. The symposium was titled “Martin Luther and Judaism,” and Dr. Millen spoke on “A New Song: The Search for Harmony in Lutheran-Jewish Relations.”
- The book ‘Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel,’ by Advisory Committee member Dr. Ruth Gruber, has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The winners will be announced in May 2004. Dr. Gruber and her daughter Celia Michaels-Evans lectured at Oxford University in November, as part of a symposium on “Women War Correspondents.”
- An essay by Academic Council member Prof. Gershon Greenberg (American University), “The Amalek of the Holocaust, ” was published in ‘Nuremberg Revisited: Bioethical and Ethical Issues,’ ed. Jacques Rozenberg (Mellen 2003). His essay “Irene Harand’s Catholic War Against Antisemitism, Vienna 1933-1938” appeared in ‘Christian Responses to the Holocaust,’ ed. Donald Dietrich (Syracuse University 2003). Prof. Greenberg will speak on “Postwar Ultra Orthodox Responses to the Holocaust,” at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, in Boston, on December 23, 2003. He will speak on “Religious Thought During the Holocaust,” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on January 12, 2004.
- An essay by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff, concerning Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism, appeared in the New Jersey Jewish Standard on December 5. His essay on China and the Holocaust appeared in the Vancouver Jewish Bulletin on December 12. Dr. Medoff’s essay concerning the Eichmann trial and the forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein was published in the Jerusalem Post on December 16.