The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey
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Book Talk
Admission: Free |
In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to her mother, also a refugee, already living in the United States. Thirty years later, with her father’s letters as her silent guide, Reissa goes on a journey, unearthing the unknowable about her family’s past and her own present. Join us for a discussion of the The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey, with Reissa in conversation with journalist and author Sandee Brawarsky.
About the Speakers
Eleanor Reissa is a Tony-nominated director (Those Were the Days), a Broadway (Indecent) and television actress (The Plot Against America), a prize-winning playwright, a former artistic director of the world’s oldest Yiddish theater, and a singer in every major venue in New York City and in festivals around the world. She is a storyteller in English and Yiddish, and the daughter of parents who lived through the Holocaust. She is the host of the Yale University/Fortunoff Archive podcast, Those Who Were There: Voices of the Holocaust. Her memoir, THE LETTERS PROJECT: A Daughter’s Journey, will be published on January 18th, 2022.
Sandee Brawarsky is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author of several books, most recently 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel from Every Angle (Abrams) with photographer Mick Hales.