Reclaiming the “Ruins of Memory”: Gender, Agency, and Imagination in Stories of the Shoah

Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture

March 23, 2022 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time

A public lecture by Sara R. Horowitz (Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities, York University, Canada)
2020-2022 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation

In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories – stories told many decades after the events occurred – often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier. Looking at these deferred stories through the lens of gender, Professor Sara R. Horowitz will explore how survivors craft accounts that insist on reclaiming, owning, and interpreting what the writer Ida Fink called “the ruins of memory,” often against the grain and in tension with academic interpretation.

Professor Sara R. Horowitz is the 2020-2022 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. She is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her books include Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Post-War French Jewish Writing (2021); Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016), which received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award; Encounter with Appelfeld (2003) and Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book. She served as the senior founding editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs – Canada (Series 1 and 2) and as founding co-editor of the journal KEREM: A Journal of Creative Explorations in Judaism. She served for many years on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and has just completed her term as Chair of the Academic Board of the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University.

Image Description: The event image is the sculpture wall of the Gleis 17/Track 17 memorial in Berlin.

Read more about Professor Horowitz here.