On Thursday, April 2 at 12 p.m., Mikhal Dekel, Ph.D., Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will speak about her recently published book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W.W. Norton, 2019).  Her talk will be delivered remotely using WebEx under the auspices of The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. To register, please click: https://ramapo.webex.com/ramapo/onstage/g.php?MTID=ed6267ec6f45a9f1a36b0bccf3f29c069

Growing up in Israel, Mikhal Dekel knew virtually nothing of her father’s past in the Holocaust. He never spoke about his experiences during the war, he had no accent, and no number tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, she discovered that he was one of a group of Polish-Jewish children who fled Nazi-occupied Poland via Russia, Uzbekistan, and Iran, ultimately reaching British-controlled Palestine.

Her quest to uncover her father’s story led Dekel to traverse the globe in these refugees’ footsteps. Her visits to archives and conversations with people in Uzbekistan, Poland, Russia, Israel and (through a proxy) Iran helped her paint a picture of interlinked and divergent histories, of death and survival, of hospitality and cruelty, and of the politics of twenty-first century memory and historical amnesia.