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Falmouth Forum Series 2008-2009
"Interpreting Holocaust Survivor Testimonies"
March 20, 2009 - Lillie Auditorium, 7:30 PM
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Lawrence Langer, Emeritus Professor of English, Simmons College, a Holocaust scholar and award-winning author
Lecture Abstract
Oral Holocaust survivor testimonies provide some unique insights into how traditional social and moral values broke down in ghettoes and German concentration and death camps. They show how circumstances created by the oppressors undermined stable cultural systems and forced their victims to adapt simple concepts like choice, guilt, maternal instinct and even basic feelings about life and death to the immediate challenge of merely staying alive.
Lawrence L. Langer was born in New York City and educated at City College of New York (BA, 1951) and Harvard University (PhD, 1961). He is Professor of English emeritus at Simmons College in Boston. In the fall of 1996 he was the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Research Institute of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In the spring of 1997 he was Koerner Research Fellow for the study of the Holocaust at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton Manor in Oxford, England. In the fall of 2002 he was the Strassler Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. In May of 2003 he was a resident scholar at the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.
His books include The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination (1975), The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978), Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (1982), Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was named one of the ten best books of 1991 by the editors of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (1995), Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995), Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak (1997), for which he wrote the text and critical commentaries, Preempting the Holocaust (1998), The Game Continues: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak (1999), In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak (2001), New Perceptions of Old Appearance in the Art of Samuel Bak (2005), Using and Abusing the Holocaust (2006) and Return to Vilna in the Art of Samuel Bak (2007).
Admission to this Falmouth Forum presentation is free and open to the public. A buffet dinner is available before the lecture at 6:00 p.m. in the Swope Center located near the auditorium. Dinner tickets are $25 and must be purchased in advance at either Eight Cousins Children’s Books, Main Street, Falmouth, or at the MBL’s Communications Office in the Candle House in Woods Hole. Dinner seats are limited and tickets are only available until they sell out or until 5:00 on the Tuesday before the lecture. For more information, contact the MBL Communications Office at: (508) 289-7423 or
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