February 18, 2002

Contact: Amy Beecher Mirecki, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, (785) 864-3516.

'Children of the Holocaust' author Helen Epstein to speak Feb. 28

LAWRENCE -- Helen Epstein, a Harvard University journalist best known for her ground-breaking book "Children of the Holocaust" will present a public lecture in Lawrence this month.

Epstein's lecture, "Memoir as a Tool for Understanding History," will be held in the ballroom of the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Lawrence at 7:30 pm on Thursday, Feb. 28.

"Children of the Holocaust" is widely used in university courses and by therapists. It is the first book to deal with second generation and post-traumatic stress syndrome in children of Holocaust survivors.

The lecture is free and open to the public. All events are sponsored by the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, English Department, Hall Center for the Humanities, KU Hillel, the Lawrence Jewish Community Center and the Jewish Community Women.

Epstein is the author of five books of non-fiction, including "Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History," a family memoir and social history of 200 years of Czech Jewish life, begun while Epstein was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies in 1982. She is also the translator from the Czech of Heda Kovaly's award-winning "Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague."

Born in Prague in 1947, Epstein became a journalist while an undergraduate caught in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For the next 25 years, she worked as a freelance cultural reporter for the Sunday New York Times and other national publications, writing profiles of such figures as Leonard Bernstein, Meyer Schapiro and Joseph Papp. Her profiles of classical musicians have been collected in the book "Music Talks." The first tenured woman professor in New York University's Department of Journalism, she has taught writing since 1974.

She is on the faculty of the Prague Summer Seminars at the Charles University and an affiliate of the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University, where she produced "In Other Words: The Jewish Writer Reads Her Work," an audio anthology on CD. A frequent lecturer on long-term psychological effects of war-related trauma as well as on family history, she represented the United States in 2001 at the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize Writers Conference in Tromso, Norway.