my.CSMD
Connections Literary Series: Author Wayne Karlin
October 21, 2024
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM
Online via Zoom
Wayne Karlin will present his latest novel, "The Genizah," and will discuss the Holocaust backgrounds of the novel and the process of turning family history into fiction, in conversation with Professor Krista Keyes.
A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial. In the novel "The Genizah," Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family’s lives—and fate—if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother’s village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.
Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it. How can anyone who has not lived it understand the Holocaust--or the terrible massacres of our own times, whether in Charleston or in Israel or in Gaza, sparked by hatred of the other? Karlin’s answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to feel, not just to know what happened, as good fiction allows us to do.
“Heartbreaking, powerful, poetic, and innovative, this novel deserves its place on every bookshelf.”
— Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, international bestselling author of "The Mountains Sing" and "Dust Child"
“Gorgeously written and one of the most powerful, poetic books I have read, I am in awe of this novel.”
— Jennifer Rosner, author of "Once We Were Home" and "The Yellow Bird Sings"
"A poetic, searching novel about fates hanging in the balance."
— Kirkus Reviews
Wayne Karlin is the author of nine novels, a short story collection, and three non-fiction books. A professor emeritus at the College of Southern Maryland, Karlin is the recipient of six State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999, the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award in 2005, and the 2019 Juniper Prize for Fiction. His books have also been published in England and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Vietnam.
If you'd like to attend this event in person, please contact Professor Krista Keyes: kakeyes@csmd.edu.