Allegra Goodman
October 12 2004, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
October 13 2004, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
Born in Brooklyn but raised in Hawaii, Allegra Goodman published her first book in 1989 while still an undergraduate at Harvard. Since then, she has written
The Family Markowitz, a collection of interlinked stories, and two acclaimed novels. In
Kaaterskill Falls, Elizabeth Shulman, a wife with five children, longs for a life outside her strict Orthodox community, while Rabbi Kirshner struggles to choose a successor. In
Paradise Park, a young woman abandoned by her boyfriend in Waikiki looks for enlightenment in all the wrong places. Goodman received a Whiting Writers' Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Tony Kushner
November 10 2004, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
November 11 2004, 7:30 PM
Ethel M. Barber Theater at Northwestern University
One of the most celebrated playwrights of the last 20 years, Tony Kushner joins the personal and political, tackling AIDS in
Angels in America; Afghanistan in
Homebody/Kabul; and, most recently, race and social revolution in the musical
Caroline, or Change. Kushner is also the author of
Brundibar, a children's book based on the 1938 opera, and co-editor of
Wrestling with Zion. He has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Tony awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Jonathan Rosen
December 1 2004, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
December 2 2004, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
Deborah Green is a rabbi who has been convinced since childhood that God lives within her, until, one evening, she looks at the moon and sees "a limbless bust of marble." Lev Friedman is a science writer who wants to learn the Kaddish prayer for his father, a Holocaust survivor who may not survive his own despair. In
Joy Comes in the Morning, Jonathan Rosen portrays Deborah and Lev's longing for faith and one another not as exotic romance, but as the classic American story. Rosen is the author of
The Talmud and the Internet and
Eve's Apple.
André Aciman
January 19 2005, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
January 20 2005, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
Perpetually displaced, André Aciman looks forward to longing. "This is how I always travel: not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip," he writes in
False Papers, a collection of essays. In
Out of Egypt, he recounts his childhood in that country, where his family prospered for three generations before a new government forced them into exile. Aciman's writing has appeared in
The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and
Best American Essays.
Eva Hoffman
February 16 2005, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
February 17 2005, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
"It is only through the efforts of imagination and memory that the shadows can be made to speak," writes Eva Hoffman. Her memoir,
Lost in Translation, follows her journey from Cold War Poland to Canada, and later, Texas, as she grapples with language, identity, and alienation. In her more recent books,
Shtetl and
After Such Knowledge, she examines life before and after the Holocaust, and the complexities of remembrance. A former editor for
The New York Review of Books, Hoffman teaches at MIT.
Savyon Liebrecht
March 16 2005, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street, Chicago
March 17 2005, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
3131 Techny Road, Northbrook
Israeli novelist Savyon Liebrecht examines everyday lives caught within the forces of historical conflict—a Jewish woman who hires three Arabs to build an extension onto her home; a Holocaust survivor who ruins every party with tales of concentration camps; an Orthodox mother who visits her daughter on a secular kibbutz. Born in 1948 in Munich to Holocaust survivors, Liebrecht immigrated to Israel as an infant. Her books include
Apples from the Desert and
A Man and a Woman and a Man.
Aharon Appelfeld- CANCELLED
May 3 2005, 6:00 PM
Chicago Cultural Center, Claudia Cassidy Theater
May 4 2005, 7:30 PM
Field Middle School Auditorium
With great regret Aharon Appelfeld cancelled his U.S. trip this spring due to his doctor's recommendations.