Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Cristina Garcia and Elizabeth Rosner in conversation
Hillside Club, Berkeley, CA Berkeley, CA
Share this event:
Event
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Cristina Garcia and Elizabeth Rosner in conversation
Join us as we welcome beloved Bay Area authors Cristina Garcia and Elizabeth Rosner in conversation about their new books. Garcia's novel, Here in Berlin, is a meditation on war and mystery fueled by the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin, while Rosner's Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Mystery is a work of nonfiction that examines the ways survivors, witnesses, and post-war generations talk about and shape traumatic experiences. We're very excited to bring these brilliant minds together for a one-time-only conversationdon't miss it!
Survivor Cafe
"Survivor Cafe takes on important issues of atrocity, trauma, and memory, rendering them all with such great clarity and intimacy that the reader will not soon forget them, or this powerful book." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental events -- the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Killing Fields begin to pass away, Survivor Cafe addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?
Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015 each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Cafe becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory -- from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small-group cross-cultural encounters.
Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Cafe offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty-first-century human inheritance -- not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever-changing conversations alive between the past and the present. Picture Here in Berlin
"A brilliant novel, by turns hilarious and haunting, gorgeous and brutal, entertaining and profound. Cristina Garcia masterfully weaves an intricate web of history and passion, finely tuned to the subtle music of the soul. Here in Berlin demonstrates exactly why Garcia has so long been an international treasure, one who never ceases to astonish." -- Carolina De Robertis, author of Perla and Gods of Tango
Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin -- its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina Garcia brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character -- vibrant and post-apocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn't believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.
A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future.
--
Elizabeth Rosner is the author of three novels and a poetry collection. The Speed of Light was translated into nine languages and won several awards in the US and in Europe, including being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina. Blue Nude was named among the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Electric City was named among the best books of 2014 by NPR. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, the San Francisco Chronicle and others She lives in Berkeley.
Cristina Garcia is the author of seven novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban -- a finalist for the National Book Award -- The Aguero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador's Hotel, and King of Cuba. Garcia has edited two anthologies, Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Garcia's work has been translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Garcia has taught at universities nationwide. Recently, she completed her tenure as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos and as Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Location
Hillside Club, Berkeley, CA (View)
2286 Cedar St.
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States
