Barbara Lesch McCaffry of the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University discusses "Gendered Identities: Holocaust Memoirs of Hidden Children" at the Arts & Humanities Forum at noon on Thursday, Oct. 11 in Schulz 1121. The event is free and open to the public.
Lesch McCaffry, a professor of 20th Century British and American Literature, is the President of the Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust at Sonoma State and has taught in the university's lecture series on the Holocaust and Genocide from 2001-2006.
Since 2001, she has been lecturing on Holocaust literature and has presented papers at the National Women's Studies Association conferences and The Legacy of the Holocaust: Women and the Holocaust Fifth International Conference in Krakow, Poland.
Lesch McCaffry says that "for most, our knowledge of children hidden during the Holocaust has been filtered through reading The Diary of Anne Frank and ends there."
She notes that there is now an ever-deepening pool of memoirs being written by children who were hidden during the Holocaust -- for many, by passing as being non-Jewish. For her, these texts raise many questions related to identity that she has been exploring. One primary one that intrigues her is what it means to be safer pretending to be someone who you are not (Christian or Catholic) and how did those, after the war, return to their original 'identity' -- or could they?
She will also be looking at differences due to gender and the age at which these children were "hidden."
For more information, contact Lesch-McCaffry at (707) 664-2273.
