Personal History: Searching for the Past in Home Movies

Watch the video

This event is presented in connection with Letters to Afar, an immersive video art installation co-presented by YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York (October 22, 2014-March 31, 2015).

The home movies featured in Letters to Afar were taken by NY Jewish immigrants who traveled back to Poland to visit during the 1920s and 30s. How do we view these films generations later? Celebrated writers Dani Shapiro and Glenn Kurtz join our series on Letters to discuss their own family films from prewar Poland, the search to identify individuals in the films, and attempts to reconstruct this vanished world. The Shapiro footage of Horodok, Poland, became the basis for the documentary Image Before My Eyes, and the Kurtz family film of a visit to Nasielsk, Poland inspired Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, which was voted “Best of 2014” by The New Yorker and National Public Radio.

Co-presented with the Museum of the City of New York.

About the Participants

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His first book, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Vintage Books), received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Kurtz also hosts “Conversations on Practice,” a discussion series about the writing process and the writer’s life. Guests have included Jennifer Egan, Patti Smith, Adam Gopnik, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Francine Prose. He has taught at Stanford University and New York University.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Vogue, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, among others, and have been broadcast on “This American Life.” She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, Wesleyan, and currently teaches private workshops internationally. She is the founder of the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy. Her newest book is Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life.