SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN
SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN
Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She graduated from Barnard College and obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard, where she went on to a long and distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature. Suleiman has published more than a dozen books and over a hundred articles in international journals, as well as book reviews in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of autobiographical works, including the acclaimed memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook. Her new memoir, Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, is due out in May 2023 from Stanford University Press.
Suleiman has won many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1990, she received the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and in 1992 she was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). In April 2018, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives.
At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.
For more on Daughter of History, click here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35985#:~:text=Daughter%20of%20History%20is%20a,lens%20on%20her%20own%20life.%22
For more on Susan Rubin Suleiman, click here: www.susansuleiman.com