The Writer’s Center welcomes novelist Wayne Karlin for a reading and discussion of his latest novel, The Genizah. Wayne is in conversation with Marc Steiner, radio host and multimedia producer.
FREE and open to the public, RSVP below.
Wayne Karlin has published eight novels, a collection of short fiction, and three non-fiction books. He has received two Fellowships in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Juniper Prize in Fiction and the Excellence in the Arts Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America. wayne-karlin.squarespace.com
Marc Steiner is one of the most recognized voices in Maryland and has gained national acclaim for his insightful style of interviewing. Always open to featuring voices from all sides of the issues, his motto is “The Truth lives in every corner.” He attributes his interviewing expertise to one word: Listening. steinershow.org
About the Book
In the novel The Genizah, Wayne Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family’s lives—and fate—if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother’s village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.
Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it.
It is a phrase that calls upon the people at the table to feel, not just to know, what happened, as good fiction calls us to do. How can anyone who had not been through the Holocaust share even a little part of such experiences? How can anyone who has not felt some of that horror reverberate in their own bones try to understand the terrible massacres of our own days, sparked by hatred of the Other, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Israel, in Gaza, in Charleston, and in Pittsburgh—in so many other places, they overwhelm our ability to empathize.
Karlin’s answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to imagine what could have happened if his grandparents, and mother, and her brothers and sisters and his father and his family, had not torn themselves away from a place they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, in a town and on a continent where they had always been unwelcome guests.
“Heartbreaking, powerful, poetic, and innovative, this novel deserves its place on every bookshelf.” —Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, international bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child
“Gorgeously written and one of the most powerful, poetic books I have read, I am in awe of this novel.” —Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings.
“Brave, beautiful, heartbreaking. Necessary in this strange, awful historical moment.” —Richard Bausch, author of Playhouse, editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.