Mihai Grunfeld, Associate
Professor of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College will introduce his newly
released memoir, Leaving - Memories of
Romania, and read excerpts recounting his childhood and adolescence as the
son of impoverished Holocaust survivors. The public is invited to the reading
at … on….
Books will be available for
purchase.
Mihai Grunfeld was born in Cluj,
Romania where he lived with his family until he was eighteen. In January 1969
he and his older brother traveled to Czechoslovakia and from there escaped to
Austria. This was the beginning of a long journey, which took him to Israel,
Italy, Sweden, and Canada in search of a home in the West. Eventually he
settled in the United States where he is a professor of Spanish and Latin
American Literature at Vassar College.
Leaving - Memories of Romania recounts the narrator's childhood
and adolescence as the son of impoverished Holocaust survivors. His parents are
unable to talk about their past, but their lives - and the lives of their two
sons - are utterly shaped by it. As he comes of age, the narrator is
increasingly conscious of his parents’ profound loneliness, the glaring gaps in
his family's history, and the questions that go unanswered. Gradually the story
of an innocent child’s tender, loving relationship with his parents evolves
into a powerful tale of complex family dynamics shaped by adolescent
experimentation, the daily grind of factory work, anti-Semitism, and big dreams
of escaping the politically restrictive system in which he lives.
…The narrator’s sensitive
awareness of the palpable loneliness in this domestic unit, and the empty
spaces in his parents’ history, as well as his probing questions, many
unanswered, makes this memoir comparable in richness to the writings of Eva
Hoffman, Art Spiegelman, and Melvin Jules Bukiet.
Gerald
Sorin, author of Tradition Transformed:
The Jewish Experience in America and A
Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920.
Information about the book and the author can be found at www.Leaving-MemoriesOfRomania.com
The book may also be purchased atwww.millrockwriters.com or www.Leaving-MemoriesOfRomania.com