Tombs. Autobiography of my Family
The Fortunoff Video Archive and the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism are delighted to announce a lecture by renowned scholar Annette Wieviorka, a senior researcher emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Wieviorka is a scholar of twentieth-century Jewish history, in particular the Holocaust, and her varied works have been profoundly influential, notably her book The Era of Witness, which was published in translation in 1998 by Cornell University Press. Wieviorka has also been a volunteer organizer and interviewer for the Fortunoff Archive’s affiliated taping project in Paris and has served as an honorary advisory board member for decades.
In her lecture, Wieviorka will present a work in progress, acknowledging that she has been “thinking about this book for about forty years, a biblical generation.” During the pandemic, the project gathered steam as she began collecting extensive documentation about her family—including testimonies. As this family archive began to take shape, Wieviorka initially planned to write a biography of her grandfather, Wolf Wieviorka, a Yiddish writer and journalist murdered in Auschwitz. However, her work evolved from a singular textual “tomb” for one family member into a history of her entire family, the maternal as well as the paternal sides. In her lecture, Wieviorka will offer her incisive, assured point of view on what we can learn from this “autobiography of a family.”
Annette Wieviorka is a senior researcher emeritus at the CNRS. She is the author of many works on the history of the Holocaust and its memory, in addition to the history of communism. Her works include Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (1992, 2003, 2013); L’ère du témoin (1998, 2013); Maurice et Jeannette. Biographie du couple Thorez (2010; 2016). Her intellectual journey was the subject of a book of interviews with Séverine Nikel: L’heure d’exactitude. Histoire, mémoire, témoignages (2011).
