Black Milk: The Fragility of Childhood in the Shoah

The University of Calgary Holocaust Memorial Lecture welcomes Dr. Sara R. Horowitz, who will consider the remembrances of four children whose wartime stories followed different paths. Many years later, their childhood memories refracted through four distinct genres – literary memoir, fiction, graphic novel, and photography – the effects of wartime atrocity and its aftermath on children and childhood. How do children who survived the Holocaust recollect what they experienced? How do they integrate these experiences in their postwar lives?

Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Humanities and former Director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. She is the author of the award-winning Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction; Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Post-War French Jewish Writing, and other books. She was recently elected to the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of her ground-breaking writing on Holocaust literature.

This lecture is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, with support from the Calgary Public Library.