Sunday, June 8, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
"From, To" --a short story by David Bezmozgis
Facilitated by Lisa Silverman
Published in the New Yorker magazine, April 14, 2025, and online on April 6, 2025.
"From, To" is a rather long short story by David Bezmozgis. It begins with a call from the protagonist's aunt, which is unusual. The story explores themes of safety and love. The story is a masterpiece and evokes a post-October setting.
Sunday, September 14, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
By Wendy Lower
Facilitated by Dr. Elizabeth Drummond, LMU History Dept.
In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler's Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter's rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. The woman is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefoot boy. And--only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower's brilliant ten-year investigation of this image--the photograph reveals the shins of another child, slipping from the woman's lap.
Wendy Lower's gripping detective work--in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States--recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of the victims, of the killers--and, remarkably, of the photographer who openly took the picture, as a secret act of resistance--are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the history and aftermath of Nazi genocide.
