An Evening With Karen Kirsten and Judy Rakowsky
Join us for an evening with Karen Kirsten on Tuesday, October 29, at 7:00 pm. Kirsten will be discussing her new book Irena’s Gift.
The program will run from 7:00-8:30pm, and doors will open at 6:30pm.
Tickets:
$30 - Includes a copy of Irena’s Gift
Free for Admission Only, Registration Required
About Irena’s Gift:
"IRENA'S GIFT interrogates the messy complexity of family, both its tenderness and nurture but also its corrosive anger and rejection. It's a disturbing investigation into the power of secrets to harm and to haunt." —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of March and Horse
In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was thirty-two, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.
Determined to understand the generational trauma that cloaked her family in silence, her own origins, and to help heal her mother’s pain, Karen set out to unearth decades of secrets and piece together a hidden history—from the glittering days of pre-war Poland to the little-known Radom Prison, where of 500 resistance members tortured, only 10 survived, her grandfather the only known Jewish one. There, Karen finds answers, yet not easy ones.
As she exposes her family’s saga of love and betrayal, countless brushes with death, precarious hiding places, and the astounding negotiation with an SS officer who saved her mother’s life, Karen must reconcile the complicated, multi-faceted truths behind human behavior.
Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history, and memoir to tell a story of sacrifice, impossible choices, impossible odds, and the way trauma reverberates throughout generations. Yet it is also a story of resilience and bravery, revealing how love and hope, too, can not only prevail through the worst imaginable circumstances, but resonate through time.
About Karen Kirsten:
Karen Kirsten is an Australian-American writer and Holocaust educator who speaks around the world on the topics of hatred and reconciliation. Karen’s essay “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life” was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories and nominated for The Best American Essays. Karen’s writing has also appeared in Salon, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, WIEZ in Poland, Boston’s NPR, The Boston Herald, The Age (Melbourne), WA Today, The Brisbane Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald. She can be found online at KarenKirsten.com
About Judy Rakowsky:
Judy Rakowsky is the author of the critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Jews in the Garden that the New York Times said, “reads like a thriller,” and listed as editor’s choice in the New York Times book review. Judy spent decades on deadline as an award-winning investigative reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, People Magazine, the Providence Journal, and other outlets.