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James Wood: The Meaning of Saul Bellow's Prose
November 30 2003, 3:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
December 1 2003, 7:00 PM
Sulzer Regional Library
James Wood, the editor of the new Library of America edition of the early novels of Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March), will talk about the vitality of the Chicago native's prose style. In contemporary society, the hardest thing is to slow down and read a writer like Bellow for the joy of his style, and yet, this is precisely what his novels demand. Wood will explore Bellow's sentences, his metaphors, his mixing of American registers, of the vernacular and the high literary, and discuss how best to appreciate his work. James Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and The Case Against God, a novel.
John Efron: Jews, Medicine, and Modernity
January 12 2004, 7:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
5215 Oakton Street, Skokie
January 13 2004, 7:00 PM
Sulzer Regional Library
4455 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago
From Maimonides to Einstein, Jews have left their distinctive mark on the world of science, especially the field of medicine, the first of the modern sciences to admit Jews to its ranks. John Efron, Koret Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, talks about the role of Jews in modern medicine, and, in turn, the role of medicine in shaping modern Jewish identity. Why did Germany provide so special an environment for the growth of medicine among Jews? How did medicine intersect with important features of modern Jewish life such as emancipation, assimilation, and Zionism? John Efron is the author of Medicine and the German Jews: A History and Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe.
Music in Exile
A performance by Chicago's New Budapest Orpheum Society
February 8 2004, 3:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
5215 Oakton Street, Skokie
February 10 2004, 7:00 PM
Sulzer Regional Library
4455 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago
Chicago's New Budapest Orpheum Society performs music written in response to the burning of books in Nazi Germany and other songs from the European cabaret tradition. Early in the twentieth century, European writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals helped to create both a new art form and a new art forum—the cabaret. Venues for popular music and burlesque humor, caberets were also havens for political satire and biting social commentary. The writers and composers of cabaret songs often worked under the threat of censorship, but with the rise of Hitler, they came to face graver consequences: book burnings, exile, and, for some, death. Composers responded to this assault on artistic life—especially the burning of books—by putting the words of banned writers to music. The program will include pieces based on texts by banned poets Kurt Tucholsky and Bertolt Brecht composed by exiles Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Paul Dessau, and Friedrich Hollaender. Curated by Philip V. Bohlman, Professor of Music at the University of Chicago and artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society.
Sander L. Gilman: Lies & Truths: The Lives of Jurek Becker
March 29 2004, 7:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
5215 Oakton Street, Skokie
March 31 2004, 7:00 PM
Sulzer Regional Library
4455 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago
What does it mean to be a German writer and Holocaust survivor? Sander Gilman, professor of Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and director of its Jewish Studies Program, will talk about his new biography, Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds. Born in 1937 in Poland, Becker survived the Lodz ghetto and Ravensbrueck, where his mother died, and was raised by his father in communist East Germany. There he wrote Jakob the Liar, widely considered the best novel on the Eastern European experience of the Holocaust written in German, and other novels which reflect the impact of the Shoah on secular German-Jewish identity under communism. An active opponent of the regime, he fled to the West in 1977. Sander Gilman's biography of Becker, who died in 1997, was published in November 2003.
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