David Slucki - Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons

12. Mai | 18:00

In 1978, Jakub Slucki passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-seven. A Holocaust survivor whose first wife and two sons had been murdered at the Nazi death camp in Chelmno, Poland, Jakub had lived a turbulent life. Just over thirty-seven years later, his son Charles died of a heart attack. David Slucki’s Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons tells the story of his father and his grandfather, and the grave legacy that they each passed on to him.

This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, Slucki’s unique memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century.

In this talk, Dr. Slucki will discuss the challenges of writing family history and will reflect on how the landscape of Holocaust memory has changed in the short time since the book was released. 

Bio

David Slucki is the Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, and the Loti Smorgon Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University. He is a historian who has written widely on Jewish life after the Holocaust, focusing particularly on survivors and their descendants, and on representations of the Holocaust. His publications include Sing This at my Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (2019) and The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History (2012). He is the co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third-generation (2016). He is currently working on projects focusing on antisemitism in Australia, Holocaust denial in popular culture, and Jews and sitcoms.

Kontakt

Alexandra Oeser
alexandra.oeser  ( at )  cmb.hu-berlin.de

Ort