The Importance of Literature for the Holocaust Survivor

The CSULB Jewish Studies Program is delighted to welcome Dr. Kitty Millet to Long Beach for her talk “The Importance of Literature for the Holocaust Survivor,” to be held at the Alpert JCC on Wednesday evening, March 29^th, at 7 pm.

In this talk, Professor Millet surveys why literature became so compelling a medium for Holocaust survivors, like Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, H.G. Adler, Charlotte Delbo. By looking at a diverse set of fictional narratives, Millet explores the unarticulated aims of  survivors as they represented their experiences through imagined contexts. In other words, several writers perceived literature as a necessary part of their survival: literature could preserve something particular that the Nazis had hoped to destroy. 

Dr. Millet is the Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She also a professor of comparative Jewish literatures and Holocaust studies and the author of The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution and Kabbalah and Literature, a study of the intersection of Kabbalah with secular Jewish literatures.  In 2018, Dr. Millet was presented with the Morris Weiss Award for Outstanding Educators of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 

Like all Jewish Studies talks, it is free and open to the public.