Award-winning poet and novelist Elizabeth Rosner, born in Schenectady to Holocaust survivors, will speak on “Healing the Wounds of History: One Writer's Journey,” Tuesday, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., at the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.
The talk, sponsored by Women's and Gender Studies, the Political Science, Psychology, English and History departments, and the Jewish Chaplaincy Fund, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception and book signing in Hale House.
The daughter of Carl H. and the late Frieda Rosner, Rosner is a graduate of Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Queensland in Australia. She attempts, through her writing, to come to terms with the impact of her parents' experiences during the Holocaust on her own life – “the indelible imprints” of her history on her language, identity and imagination.
Her first novel, “The Speed of Light” (2001), tells the story of a brother and sister whose father survived the Nazi death camps. Her new novel, “Blue Nude” (2006), was a by-product of her involvement with Acts of Reconciliation, a project that brought together second generation Germans and Jews to confront their shared legacy from World War II. The book depicts an encounter between a post-war German painter and an Israeli artist's model living in Northern California.