Book Talk – An Unforeseen Legacy, with with Monica Berger Moïsi

An Unforeseen Legacy: Letters from our German-Jewish Grandparents: 1940–1941 In summer 2021, Monica Berger Moïsi returned to her family home in New Jersey for the first time since her mother Harriet’s death. In the interval, the family had found a folder containing 120 pages of letters from her grandparents in Nazi Germany. Harriet had never mentioned the correspondence, or at least not to her children Monica, Anita, and Robert. The letters spanned the period from October 1940 to November 1941. They sparked an intense rush of emotion, and Monica decided to translate them. In the process, she began to dig deeper, turning to German sources and archives in and around her mother’s hometown. She read how eagerly her grandparents had awaited news about Harriet’s daily life, trying to understand her circumstances and choices, happy she was safe. They would report on visits with friends and acquaintances, yet their fear and desperation became more and more palpable. Meanwhile, Harriet was adjusting to and enjoying New York and struggling to get her parents out of Germany. Eighty years later, Monica’s pressing questions evolved into a research project that led her and her husband Francis back to Westphalia and back into Harriet’s life. ‘Back’ because there is also an unusual postwar coda to this story. Harriet had resumed contact with her pre-war friends starting in 1970 when she first returned to her hometown and brought her own children along. So, Monica and Francis were in familiar territory when they returned to towns, villages and cemeteries, meeting with archivists, authorities and descendants of Harriet’s friends. In this evening talk, we will here from Monica in conversation with Professor Emeritus Jay Winter, as they discuss the process of discovery, research, and writing of Monica’s recent book, An Unforeseen Legacy: Letters from our German-Jewish Grandparents: 1940–1941. About the Speakers Monica Berger Moïsi graduated Tufts University with a BA Magna Cum Laude in French and German and then completed a Master’s in French at the University of California, Berkeley. In France she passed the Agrégation in English and obtained a doctorate in English Literature. Monica taught high school English as a foreign language for many years in the Paris region. She has also been very active in the Progressive Jewish movement in Paris as an officer and a committed member. Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus at Yale University. He is an historian of the First World War, and the author of Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The Great War in European cultural history, published in 1995, editor of America and the Armenian Genocide (2008), and editor-in-chief of the three-volume Cambridge history of the First World War, published in 2014 in English, French, and in Chinese. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the Katholic University of Leuven, and the University of Paris – VIII. In 2017 he received the Victor Adler Prize of the Austrian government for a lifetime of work in history.