Unearthing the Past: Writing about the Holocaust 80 Years Later

Sunday, November 2 | 2-3:30pm

What does it mean to write about the Holocaust 80 years after the fact, in the mid-2020s? Posing this question raises many more questions than answers. Join us for a panel discussion that grapples with these questions in commemoration of the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, featuring authors from across Oregon and moderated by Heidi Kaufman, OJMCHE Regional Museum Educator and Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon.

First, there is the issue of authenticity. These stories aren’t the author’s own, particularly for second-generation American writers. Increasingly, they belong to previous generations, to people who are no longer here to tell the stories themselves or to offer corrections when current authors miss the mark. Digging deeper, there is the question of why one would unearth and recount old stories in the first place, particularly when the family members who lived them, by and large, remained silent about their experiences? Particularly for narratives rather than academic investigations, there is the temptation toward contriving a story about stock “noble survivors” or “heroic saviors” whose arc always leads to an uplifting ending.

This all leads to the further questions of: What are the goals of writing about the Holocaust for second-generation, non-academic writers—beyond a simply egoistic or sentimental exercise? And after eight decades, who is the intended audience for these resurrected narratives and studies?

About the Panelists

• Jacob Boas, historian and translator, was born in Transit Camp Westerbork in the Netherlands in 1943. His books include Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (Archon Books, 1985); Mr. Holocaust (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2005, Dutch only); We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (Holt/MacMillan,1995); Writers’ Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (Legenda, 2016), Cultural Criticism in the Netherlands, 1933-1940: The Newspaper Columns of Menno ter Braak (Brill, 2020); and Until Further Notice… Theresienstadt On My Mind (KTAV, 2024). He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Patricia. Learn more on his website. 
• Marat Grinberg emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1993, studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. A scholar of Jewish and Russian literature and culture, and of cinema, he is a professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Grinberg is the author of “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and co-editor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2013). Marat Grinberg’s most recent essays have appeared in Tablet Magazine, Mosaic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Jewish Journal. Grinberg’s latest book, published by Brandeis University Press’s Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, is The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines. His translation of Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine came out this year in the Immigrant Worlds and Texts series from Academic Studies Press. 
• Patricia Haim was born and raised in New York City. She lived in Melbourne for three years and graduated from the University of Melbourne’s honors program in English language and literature. After that, she returned to the United States for graduate school at Duke University and, eventually, Notre Dame Law School. She retired after a career specializing in employment, labor, and immigration law. Her memoir, Lifelines: A Viennese Family’s Letters from Home and Exile, 1938-1947, published in July 2025. She lives in Bend, Oregon. 
• Heidi Kaufman is Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon. She works on nineteenth-century literary culture, archives, digital humanities, and Caribbean culture. Her most recent book, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End (University of Virginia, 2022, winner of the 2023 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award) focuses on reading archival traces of Jewish women’s literary history. Her current teaching and research focus on Holocaust literary and material culture. In 2023 Heidi joined the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education as Regional Museum Educator.