Literary Reading

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Past Event ....... February 12^th, 2009 — 7:00 pm

Seed of Sarah

Click here for a 5 minute video of Katalin Vecsey reading from Seed of Sarah at LPL.

Thursday, Feb. 12, 7 p.m. in Callahan Hall, a reading of selections from Judith Isaacson’s acclaimed Holocaust book Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor and its soon-to-be-released sequel, presented by Katalin Vecsey, a member of the Bates College theater faculty. The author will be in attendance to answer questions and sign copies of her book. Free admission.

Further details… Judith Isaacson

The writings of Holocaust survivor Judith Magyar Isaacson will be featured in a free public event in Callahan Hall at the Lewiston Public Library on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m.

Selections from Isaacson’s book Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor, as well as a soon-to-be published sequel, will be presented aloud by Katalin Vecsey, a member of the Bates College theater faculty.

A native of Hungary who moved to Lewiston following World War II as the bride of an American soldier, Isaacson penned Seed of Sarah to recount her experiences as a young woman interred in the infamous German concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hessisch Lichtenau. The book has become a best-seller for its publisher, the University of Illinois Press, since its release in 1990, and subsequent German and Hungarian translations have been in demand in Europe as well.

Isaacson was born as Jutka Magyar in 1925 in KaposvÃ¡r, Hungary. She lived through four years of Nazi occupation. In August of 1944, she and her mother Rose, her aunt Magda, and her grandmothers were deported to Auschwitz, where her grandmothers were separated and sent to the gas chambers. Isaacson, her mother and her aunt were taken to Lichtenau and finally to Tekla, a camp near Leipzig. They were liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945. Her father, JenÃ¶ Magyar, was sent to a labor camp in Hungary and then to two German camps – Buchenwald and then Muhldorf Lager, where he died at the end of the war at the age of 45.

Katalin Vecsey, who will be reading from Isaacson’s books at the LPL event, is also from Hungary. She was introduced to Isaacson after coming to the area in 1995 to join the Bates theater department and the two have become close friends. In addition to an excerpt from Seed of Sarah, Vecsey will also read a chapter from Isaacson’s new, still-untitled book in which the author focuses on her life as an American. Here Isaacson tells of a chance meeting that she had with an older gentleman on a train while she was traveling in Hungary in 1977 doing research for Seed of Sarah. When he found out the reason for Isaacson’s visit, he haltingly revealed a secret that he had never before shared with anyone, and the two travelers were suddenly no longer strangers.

Judith Isaacson was awarded a bachelor’s degree from Bates College in 1965, at the age of 40 and after having raised three children. She went on to earn a master’s degree from Bowdoin and then accepted a job teaching mathematics at Lewiston High School, becoming head of the math department there. She was hired as Dean of Women at Bates College in 1969 and retired in 1977 as Bates’ Dean of Students. She has served on the Governing Board of Bowdoin College and was the recipient of its Hargraves Freedom Prize. She holds honorary degrees from Bates College, Colby College and the University of New England. She has been married to local attorney Irving Isaacson for 63 years and is the proud grandmother of eight grandchildren.

Katalin Vecsey received her doctoral degree from the EÃ¶tvÃ¶s LÃ³rÃ¡nd University in her native city of Budapest, Hungary. She taught at BÃ¡rczi GusztÃ¡v College and at drama conservatory programs in Budapest before accepting her current position at Bates as a lecturer in theater and vocal director for the college’s theater productions. She lives in Lewiston with her husband, John L. Painter, and their son, Kelen.

Isaacson will be present to answer questions and sign copies of her book following the reading on Feb. 12. The library is located at 200 Lisbon Street at the corner of Pine Street in downtown Lewiston. More information is available by contacting the Lewiston Public Library at 513-3050.

Posted: Friday, January 30th, 2009 in Discussion, Presentation, Read Aloud