When: Thursday, November 4
Where: Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York City
What time: 6:30 p.m.

With Michael Biggins, Uri Cohen, Annie Cohen-Solal, and Jože Pirjevec

Tickets: $15/$10 for Members of PEN, CJH, and CPL and affiliates of the Consulate General of Slovenia

Organized by the Center for Jewish History and CPL. Co-sponsored by PEN World Voices Festival in collaboration with the Slovenian Consulate.

The aftermath of World War One brought about a new geopolitical configuration, perceived as detrimental by most of the ethnic minorities that had made up the former Austro Hungarian Empire. In the cosmopolitan port city of Trieste, the ethnic Slovenes became the target of discrimination. With the advent of Fascism, those who resisted Italian efforts at assimilation were imprisoned, shot, sent to concentration camps.

In 1941 Boris Pahor, who later became one of the most prominent Slovene authors, was drafted in Mussolini’s army. He returned to Trieste in 1943, after the armistice, a city occupied by the Nazis. He joined the Yugoslav resistance forces, was arrested in 1944 and sent to Dachau, Struthof, Harzungen and Bergen-Belsen. His memoir of his camp experiences, Necropolis, recently published in English by Dalkey Archive Press, will be the centerpiece of this event.

Jože Pirjevec (University of Udine, Italy, and the University of Primorska, Slovenia), Uri Cohen (Columbia University), Annie Cohen-Solal (NYU), and Michael Biggins (University of Washington Libraries and Pahor’s translator) will join to explore Trieste’s cultural diversity then and now, and how one of Europe’s most multicultural cities became an epicenter of racist violence a full decade before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.