Please join us when historian Lawrence N. Powell, author of ACCIDENTAL CITY: Improvising New Orleans, presents the (almost) 20th anniversary edition of his award-winning book, TROUBLED MEMORY: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana.
This powerful book tells the story of Anne Skorecki Levy, a Holocaust survivor who transformed the horrors of her childhood into a passionate mission to defeat the political menace of reputed neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The first book to connect the prewar and wartime experiences of Jewish survivors to the lives they subsequently made for themselves in the United States, Troubled Memory is also a dramatic testament to how the experiences of survivors as new Americans spurred their willingness to bear witness. Perhaps the only family to survive the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto as a group, the Skoreckis evaded deportation to Treblinka by posing as Aryans. The family eventually made their way to New Orleans, where they became part of a vibrant Jewish community. Lawrence Powell traces their dramatic odyssey and explores the events that eventually triggered Anne Skorecki Levy's brave decision to honor the suffering of the past by confronting the recurring specter of racist hatred.
Lawrence N. Powell, professor emeritus of history at Tulane University, currently serves as chair of the Louisiana State Museum Board and the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He previously held the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization at Tulane University. His critically acclaimed book, THE ACCIDENTAL CITY: Improvising New Orleans (Harvard, 2012), covers the first 150 years of New Orleans history.
This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes.