Susan Rubin Suleiman

CAN YOU GO HOME AGAIN?

Reflections on Displacement and Return

Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you remember it? Harvard professor Susan Suleiman will discuss and read from her new memoir, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, an account of her return to her native city before and after the fall of Communism. Suleiman, a child survivor of the Holocaut, left Budapest in 1949 with her parents, shortly after her tenth birthday. Thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons for a brief vacation, and in 1993 she spent six months there as a Fellow of the newly founded Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. Suleiman's relation to her birthplace is like that of many others who have had to leave their country of origin at an early age: she speakes the language "like a native," but with an accent. She will discuss her search for personal and family history, against the backdrop of the history of Jews in Hungary and the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of "The Change" in their lives after 1989.

Thursday, May 15th

Stanford University Bookstore

4:30pm

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