Calendar of Events
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1 event,
Author Talk: Mary Fillmore
Author Talk: Mary Fillmore
An Address in Amsterdam
Mary Fillmore
Wednesday, November 30 at 7 p.m.
Mary Fillmore will talk about the 13-year-long creation of An Address in Amsterdam, an historical novel about a young Jewish woman who joins the underground. Fictional Rachel Klein must grow up fast when she decides to take a stand against the Nazi occupiers, alongside an artist who became a forger, a librarian who is an underground leader, and a former student who assassinates betrayers of the resistance. How did Mary, a non-Dutch Gentile born after the war, become haunted by this subject? What research was needed to reconstruct the world of 1940-43 for the modern reader? Amsterdam was once a sanctuary for Jewish people for centuries, but the highest percentage of its Jewish population was murdered compared to the rest of Western Europe. How did that happen, and how does it bear on our own times? An Address in Amsterdam both carries the warning of how fast an open, liberal society can change, and offers the example of an ordinary young woman who decides to take courageous action again and again, even when she is tired and afraid.
1 event,
First Wednesdays Talk
First Wednesdays Talk
Wednesday, December 7th at 7 p.m.
Wallace Stevens and the Art of the Empty Mind
Yale Professor of English and Dean of humanities Amy Hungerford demonstrates how, in the early 20th century, Wallace Stevens set out to clear away a Romantic view of nature and see the world freshly in his distinctly modern poetry.