[Live on Zoom] Sing This at My Funeral – A Memoir of Fathers and Sons

Book Talk Admission: Free Registration is required. Watch the video

In 1978, Jakub Slucki passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-seven. A Holocaust survivor whose first wife and two sons had been murdered at the Nazi death camp in Chelmno, Poland, Jakub had lived a turbulent life. Just over thirty-seven years later, his son Charles died of a heart attack. David Slucki’s Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons tells the story of his father and his grandfather, and the grave legacy that they each passed on to him.

This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men. It is a story of a family’s century-long attachment to the Jewish Labor Bund. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, Slucki’s unique memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century.

Join us for a discussion of this new book with author and historian David Slucki in conversation with Eddy Portnoy (YIVO Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions).

About the Speakers

David Slucki is the Loti Smorgon Associate Professor in Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University. He is the author of The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, and Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust.

Eddy Portnoy is the Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press 2017).