Savyon Liebrecht in Residence
In Spring 2014, the EWCJS and Israeli Stage were proud to host award-winning author and playwright Savyon Liebrecht for a two-week residency featuring performances and lectures, including the Leon and Alice F. Newton Family Lecture in Jewish Studies.
Savyon Liebrecht was born in Munich in 1948. She moved to Israel with her parents—Polish survivors of the Holocaust—in 1950; indeed, the challenges facing the children of survivors figure prominently in her fiction, above all perhaps in her debut collection of stories Apples from the Desert (1986). Liebrecht studied literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
Liebrecht has an uncanny ability to describe and understand the inner and outer lives of women. As one critic has noted, her female protagonists—heroines and narrators, grandmothers, mothers, daughters and wives—are able to “win by opening themselves to the other,” across national, class, and religious boundaries. Her short fiction, novellas, novels and plays have been translated into German, Italian, English, French, Chinese, Estonian, and published in anthologies around the world. She has won numerous awards, among them the Alterman Literary Prize for Apples from the Desert (1987), the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature (1992,1999), and the Playwright of the Year Award (2004 and 2006).
Two of Liebrecht’s plays were performed on the BU campus: “Freud’s Women” at at the BU Playwrights’ Theater on March 30, 2014 and “The Banality of Love” on April 28, 2014, in commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Program
March 24th at 1PM: “Writing about the Shoah: A Conversation with Savyon Liebrecht” at Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies
March 26th at 7PM: The Leon and Alice Newton Lecture by Savyon Liebrecht at Boston University’s Hillel
March 27th at 7PM: “Dear Sigmund and Carl” at Brandeis University’s Spingold Theatre + Q&A
March 28th at 11AM: “Writing about the Holocaust,” a lecture by Savyon Liebrecht at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies*
March 29th at 2PM: “Dear Sigmund and Carl” at Babson College + Q&A
March 30th at 7PM: “Freud’s Women” at Boston University’s Boston Playwrights Theatre + Q&A
March 31st at 8PM: “Dear Sigmund and Carl” at Babson College + Q&A
April 2nd at 4PM: “The Creative Process,” a lecture by Savyon Liebrecht at Emerson College
Produced in partnership with: Babson College, Boston University (Jewish Cultural Endowment, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, The Hebrew Program, Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature), Brandeis University (Center for German & European Studies, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies), CJP, Emerson College, Goethe-Institut Boston and StandWithUs.