Echoes of Exile: A Family's Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War
Book Presentation and Panel Discussion with author Daniela Spenser
Echoes of Exile: A Family's Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War
Dr. Daniela Spenser presents “Echoes of Exile” in discussion with Prof. Michael Berkowitz, Dr. Jakub Benes and Dr. William A. Booth
Echoes of Exile reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Daniela Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Daniela Spenser is a fellow at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City. She is author of The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s and Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International.
Michael Berkowitz, a native of Rochester, New York, is Professor of modern Jewish history at University College London and editor of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England (UCL Press). He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and taught previously at the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, and the University of Judaism (then West Coast branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America).
Originally from Oakland, California, Jakub Beneš earned a BA in International Studies from Middlebury College, Vermont and then a PhD in European History from the University of California, Davis. From 2012 to 2015 he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham. He taught at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham before coming to UCL SSEES in autumn 2019.
William Booth is a historian of twentieth century Latin America with a particular focus on Mexico and U.S.-Latin American relations. His research largely focuses on socialism and communism in the Americas, on radical transnational networks, and on the historiography of the Cold War. He has taught at Warwick, Oxford, LSE and Johns Hopkins SAIS as well as UCL History and the Institute of the Americas. He is a member of UCU Executive Committee for UCL branch as well as department UCU rep, and is a member of the UCL BDS group.