Marianne Hirsch

BIOGRAPHY

Marianne Hirsch  is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she also has an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She was born in Romania, and educated at Brown University where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees.  Before moving to Columbia, she taught at Dartmouth College for many years. Her recent publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (ed.1999), Time and the Literary (co-ed.2002), a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory" (co-ed. 2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (co-ed. 2004).  Over the last few years, she has also published numerous articles on cultural memory, visuality and gender, particularly on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust in literature, testimony and photography.  Currently, she is writing a book with Leo Spitzer Ghosts of Home : The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. 

Marianne's parents  Lotte Gottfried Hirsch and Carl Hirsch, both from Czernowitz.  They married in the ghetto in 1941 and survived the war in the city.  They emigrated to Romania in 1945, and arrived in the US in 1961. In 1998, Marianne, her parents and her husband Leo traveled to Chernivtsi together.  This trip inspired the book Marianne and Leo are now completing. 


Leo Spitzer

BIOGRAPHY

Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University.  His recent publications include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang 1998), Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge 1990, Hill & Wang 1999) and the co-edited Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE 1999).  He has also written numerous articles on Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its generational transmission. . Currently, he is working on a book, Ghosts of Home, with Marianne Hirsch.

Leo was born in Bolivia where his parents had fled from the Nazis from Austria.  He has lived in the US since 1950.  Leo studied at Brandeis and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

Bukovina / Czernowitz Publications

hirsch-pmla.pdf
Marianne Hirsch's final column as editor of the PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association) provides a  commentary on  the multilayered historical landscape of the Bukovinian city of Czernowitz through  its  writers, artists and poets.  The document is in pdf format, so you will need  Acrobat reader or the equivalent to view it. See below.

hirsch-spitzer.pdf
This 14 page document written by Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer is from the journal  'American IMAGO'. It is in Adobe Acrobat .pdf format*. The article is a scholarly documentary of a family's return to Czernowitz as seen through each of their eyes. The picture of an 'idealized Czernowitz' in the eyes of the adult children' stands in contrast to the 'reality' experienced by their parents during the war. A very interesting read both from the story telling and analytical points of view. 

*Now, if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or better, you should be able to simply click on the filename and bring up the Adobe Reader which will display the article. If you don't have the Reader, you can get it for free at:
http://www.adobe.com/acrobat    Click on support; choose downoads.

testimonial-objects.pdf
Testimonial Objects: This article focuses on a cookbook from Terezin and a miniature book from the Vapniarka concentration camp in Transnistria.   The essay argues that such material remnants  enable us to consider crucial questions about the past, and about how the past comes down to us in the present.  It tells the story of Vapniarka on the basis of  the little book that was give to Dr. Arthur Kessler  by his patients in the camp.

picture.pdf
What's Wrong with this Picture:  This article begins with a street photograph taken on the Herrengasse in Cernauti in 1942 and considers the role of such old photos, handed down across generations, in the lives and works of those who inherit them.