Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

A lecture by Prof Marianne Hirsch and Prof Leo Spitzer inspired by their work, 'Ghosts of Home'.

The Library is very pleased to welcome Professor Marianne Hirsch and Professor Leo Spitzer from Columbia University to give a lecture based on their new book, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, published by the University of California Press.

The book is an original blend of history and communal memoir, and is the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language. Czernowitz, now in modern-day Ukraine, was known as the ‘Vienna of the East’ under the Habsburg Empire – a vibrant centre of Jewish-German Eastern European culture.

But after World War II, this unique cultural hub had vanished, left to live on in an idealised version, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom.

Hirsch and Spitzer find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore – but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. The book offers a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

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