On Sunday 14 May 2023 from 5.30pm-7pm. Barnet Libraries Literary Festival 2023 welcomes Jonathan Freedland, Martha Leigh and Simon May in conversation with David Herman, chief fiction reviewer for The Jewish Chronicle discussing their recent books. The event includes a Q&A and book signing session.
There will be a bookseller in attendance and Jonathan, Martha and Simon will be on hand to sign purchased books.
Booking a ticket is essential.
Jonathan Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and writes regularly for The Jewish Chronicle. He presents BBC Radio 4 contemporary history series The Long View. Jonathan also writes thrillers, under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
Jonathan will be discussing this book, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz, the story of Rudolf Vrba.
In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba broke out of Auschwitz. His mission: to warn the world.
Martha Leigh's first book Couldn’t Afford the Eels: An Oral History of Wapping 1900-1960 was published in 2008.
Her latest book is Invisible Ink: A Family Memoir, which tells the story of her parents, Ralph, and Edith. Ralph Leigh was a brilliant, poor Jew from the East End who went on to become a renowned Rousseau scholar and professor of French literature at Cambridge.
Edith, also Jewish, grew up in Czernowitz in what is now Ukraine. She was a gifted pianist. The couple met in Paris in 1937 as students but were forced apart at the onset of the Second World War but were later reunited and married in 1945.
Simon May was born in London, the son of a violinist and a brush manufacturer. He is visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London.
Simon has written articles for newspapers such as The Washington Post and the Financial Times, as well as a book of his own aphorisms, Thinking Aloud: A Collection of Aphorisms, which was named a Financial Times Book of the Year.
Simon’s most recent book is How to be a Refugee: One Family’s Story of Exile and Belonging, the memoir of his German family who hid their Jewishness, even from themselves.
It is the story of how three German-born sisters (his mother and his two aunts) dealt with their Jewish heritage during the Nazi years. Simon was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish, German, or British.
David Herman is chief fiction reviewer for the Jewish Chronicle and contributing editor for the Journal of The Association of Jewish Refugees. He has written on Holocaust literature for the Guardian, the Independent, and elsewhere, and has produced TV programmes on related subjects for BBC2 and Channel 4.
