Aaron Roland Endowed Lecture: "History - (his) story: the Historian and his Lost People" with Ivan Jablonka

Aaron Roland Endowed Lecture: "History - (his) story: the Historian and his Lost People" with Ivan Jablonka
Date
Mon October 21st 2013, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Event Sponsor
Humanities Center, Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Location
Levinthal Hall, 424 Santa Teresa St.

Ivan Jablonka, Associate Professor of History at the Université Paris XIII Nord (France)

History - (his) story: the Historian and his Lost People.Studying the Holocaust: family, history, memory

The History of the Grandparents I Never Had: Drawing on public archives, oral and written testimony, historian Ivan Jablonka will discuss how he investigated the lives and deaths of his grandparents, murdered at Auschwitz. Their lives ended long before his ever began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. Persecuted as Communists in Poland, as illegal aliens in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, they lived their entire lives underground. In The History of the Grandparents I Never Had, he forges an innovative narrative that combines history and literature as well as distance and empathy in order to bring back to life his murdered grandparents.