LIVE from NYPL: Holocaust Remembrance Day: Memory, Family, and Survival

The authors of two new memoirs share the stories of families that were irrevocably reshaped by the Holocaust.

In The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey, Tony-nominated actor and director Eleanor Reissa blends a sweeping history of the Holocaust with an intimate personal narrative about discovering family secrets buried in a secret trove of love letters. In Always Remember Your Name, sisters Andra Bucci and Tatiana Bucci, imprisoned in Auschwitz at the ages of 4 and 6, recount their story of survival and of the motherly love that reunited their family against impossible odds. Both books demonstrate that even the families who had survived the Holocaust would never be free of it. 

The Bucci sisters, along with their translator Ann Goldstein, join Eleanor Reissa to speak with critic and biographer Ruth Franklin about the legacy of the Holocaust on the ties that bind families together and keep them apart. 

The program will be streamed live on this page. If you encounter any issues, please join us on NYPL's YouTube channel.

Borrow from the NYPL Catalog:

• The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey
• Always Remember Your Name
• E-Book app: SimplyE, available on iOS and Android
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Purchase from the Library Shop — proceeds benefit the New York Public Library:

• The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey
• Always Remember Your Name

• Works by Primo Levi — NYPL Catalog ;  NYPL Talking Books ;  Bookshare
• Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust, by Paul Weindling — NYPL Catalog

• The Man Who Never Stopped, by Aharon Apelfeld — NYPL Catalog ;  NYPL Talking Books ;  Bookshare
• A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, by Ruth Franklin — NYPL Catalog
• If This Is A Man, by Primo Levi — NYPL Catalog ;  Bookshare
• The Overstory, by Richard Powers — NYPL Catalog ;  NYPL Talking Books ;  Bookshare

Andra (b .1939) and Tatiana Bucci (b. 1937) were born in Fiume, the daughters of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. They were deported to Auschwitz along with their mother, grandmother, aunt, and a cousin. When the camp was liberated in 1945. they were sent first to Czechoslovakia and later to the UK where their parents finally tracked them down. They were reunited with their parents in 1946. Today, they bear witness in schools and at the camps.

Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alessandro Barrico, and is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foregin Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Eleanor Reissa is a Tony-nominated director (Those Were the Days); Broadway/television actress (Indecent/HBO's The Plot Against America); a prize-winning playwright, former artistic director of the Folksbiene, podcast host, and a headliner in every major venue in New York City and festivals around the world; a storyteller in English and Yiddish, and the daughter of parents who lived through the Holocaust. 

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at The New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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