The Art of Personal and Collective Memory

Memory is powerful. It allows us to compare the past with the present, and to anticipate the future. Sometimes, that comparison allows us to recognize and talk about truths ¿ whether personal , cultural or political -- that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

In this installment of the GLS Ideas and Conversations series, Anna Szjanert-Klein (MALS '14) and Margaret Brill (MALS '15), share from Master's projects that focus in some way on acts of remembering.

In The Ruined Garden, Twenty Years Later: Jewish Cemeteries in Poland as a Testimony to the State of Affairs, Anna Szajnert-Klein relates, through words and images, her quest into the vanished world of Polish Jewry, a world that flourished for about a millennium until its brutal annihilation in recent history. In this presentation, she investigates the most abundant vestiges of that world: Poland¿s Jewish cemeteries. Their condition tells us a lot about the complex history of Polish-Jewish relations.

In Against the Grain: Reclaiming the Life I Left Behind, Margaret Brill describes her experiences as an adventurous young woman who became "the dependent wife of a Foreign Service officer" during the 1960s and 1970s. While her own goals and desires were subservient to those of her husband, she lived a rich and interesting life in "hotspots throughout Africa and beyond" that- in retrospect - helped to make her the person she is today.