Sadness is a White Bird -- A Conversation with Poet and Author Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Michael Chabon has described Moriel Rothman-Zecher's 2018 novel Sadness is a White Bird as "nuanced, sharp and beautifully written."  Selected by the National Book Foundation as one of the best five books of the year written by a novelist under the age of 35, it is an exploration of conflicted love, embattled attachments to one's people, family, and embattled politics. The narrator is an 18 old American-born Jew poised to enter the Israeli army amid a "passionate, poetic coming-of-age ...mine field." ("Kirkus" starred review). The book's treatment of his fraught visit to the site of a Jewishly emptied Salonika is based, in large measure, on the work of former Stanford PhD student Devin Naar, now Associate Professor of History at University of Washington, Seattle. The author will be in conversation with Stanford's Vered Shemtov, Eva Chernov Lokey Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Language and Literature and Koshland Professor Steven J. Zipperstein.