"Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory" A book presentation with authors Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer


East of the Carpathian Mountains and divided along the border of Romania and modern-day Ukraine, there is an invisible city, known as Czernowitz (Cernăuţi). Known as the "Vienna of the East" under the Habsburg Empire, its vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II. An idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom.

In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the survival of the Jewish Czernowitz in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore—but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. The book is published by the University of California Press.

This book presentation and conversation with the authors will take place in the RCINY Gallery / Cărtureşti Book Exhibition space.


Marianne Hirsch was born in Romania and immigrated to the United States with her parents in 1962. She studied Comparative Literature at Brown University where she received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. She taught at Dartmouth College for thirty years, and is currently William Peterfied Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Women and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. She is the winner of many fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim, ACLS, Rockefeller, and numerous others. For the last two decades, she has been writing about cultural memory, particularly about the inherited memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her latest book 'Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory,' co-authored with her husband Leo Spitzer, is a family/communal memoir about the city in which her parents grew up and survived the Holocaust.

Leo Spitzer was born in Bolivia, to parents who fled Nazi persecution in Austria, and was raised in La Paz within a community of German-speaking refugees. He is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus from Dartmouth College, where he has taught for forty years. He has published many essays and written a number of books - all of which directly or indirectly deal with displacement, resistance, and with the role of personal and cultural memory. He lives in New York City and Norwich, Vermont with his wife and long-time collaborator, Marianne Hirsch.