Mikhal Dekel is Professor of English and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation, among others. She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugees Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2019); Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014); and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations, and blogs have appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review among others.

In her lecture, Dr. Dekel will tell the story of her father and the odyssey from Poland to Iran at the core of his childhood—an experience which he never talked about, though it informed every aspect of his being. His wartime odyssey was also part of a larger chapter in the history of World War II, that of a quarter million Polish-Jewish refugees in Central Asia and the Middle East. The fact that most Polish Jews who survived the war had followed this path has been until now virtually unknown.

Refreshments will be served.