“Czernopol—less an invented place than the distilled essence of a number of post-imperial Eastern European cities, including the author’s own birthplace — is a smug little latter-day Sodom, squalid and venal and defiantly backward, except in one crucial respect. ‘Laughter in Czernopol,’ the narrator tells us, ‘had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity…well endowed with the most vivid references, not to mention all manner of innuendos.’ As you can perhaps imagine, this makes the town a lively place to visit.”—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
On May 6th, NYRB invites you to make that lively visit to Bukovina—Gregor von Rezzori‘s home, and the real-life inspiration for the fictional Czernopol. Bukovina is the simultaneously colorful and chaotic backdrop to Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, and An Ermine in Czernopol. Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White will come together for this discussion, moderated by NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, at the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, to travel through the magically whimsical and irrevocably lost Bukovina—and to take you there with them.
Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 1PM
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place
New York City
Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members/NYRB readers/Museum members and students with valid ID.
Co-sponsored by Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and New York Review of Books Classics