Our next meeting of the CBI Book Club, facilitated by Dr. Suzanne Levy Graver, Professor Emerita at Williams College, will take place over Zoom on Thursday, February 19 at 7:30pm (EST).

We will discuss The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and Life of a Fighter by George Szirtes.

The Photographer at Sixteen is a poet’s memoir of his mother that flows backwards through time, through a tumultuous period of European history – a tender and yet unsparing autobiographical journey. In July 1975, Magda Szirtes died in the ambulance on the way to hospital after she had tried to take her own life; the memoir spools into the past, through her exile in England, her flight with her husband and two young boys from Hungary in 1956 and her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer, and the unknowable fate of her vanished family in Transylvania. The woman who emerges – with all her contradictions – is utterly captivating.

All are welcome! This book is available to purchase online in multiple formats. Those who plan on joining us should RSVP via our website; Zoom information will be sent to all who RSVP once the date gets closer.