On Thursday, September 1 at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, and Toronto-based author Judith Kalman for the launch of her book Called to Testify: The Big Story in My Small Life (2022, Sutherland House).
At this in-person event, Kalman will be joined by host and award-winning editor Barbara Pulling for an evening to address the author’s experience when she was invited to Lüneburg (Germany) to testify at the trial of Oskar Gröning, accused of facilitating 300,000 murders at Auschwitz.
This event is free + open to all of our community, and registration is mandatory.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
Covid Protocols: For all in-person events, attendees must provide proof of vaccination, wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection), and consent to having their temperature checked at the front door. We ask that if you are showing any symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
Please be sure to register for this event.
You can purchase Called to Testify by Judith Kalman at Massy Books.
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Book + Author
How does a secular, non-practising Jew who has lived most of her life outside the Jewish community suddenly find herself in the front rows of a Nazi war crimes tribunal?
In 2015, the award-winning writer Judith Kalman was invited to Lüneburg to testify at the trial of Oskar Gröning, accused of facilitating 300,000 murders at Auschwitz. She appeared on behalf of a relative she had never met, a child of her father’s first marriage, who died in the camp.
Kalman not only found herself in the unaccustomed company of survivors who had built their identities and missions out of Holocaust remembrance, but grappling with profound questions of loss, guilt, and restitution.
For the first time in her life, she was forced to confront her parents’ tragic past, and how it had confounded her own sense of who she wanted to be: “Broken friendships, missed expectations, difficult family relationships, and a problematic marriage were all forged in the heritage of loss.”
Testimony is a beautiful, thoughtful memoir about the meaning of life in the wake of traumatic events, coming to terms with your identity, and understanding the magnitude of what can never be restored.
Judith Kalman is the author of The County of Birches and a range of stories, poems, and essays. Her writing has appeared in Saturday Night, Descant, Prairie Fire, the anthology Celebrating Canadian Women, and the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women.
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Host
Barbara Pulling is an award-winning editor, literary consultant and publishing specialist. She’s won the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence in 2000 for her work on The Bear’s Embrace by Patricia Van Tighem. Since 1999, She’s taught and guest-lectured at Simon Fraser University in Continuing Studies, the Book Editing and Fiction Editing workshops, and the Master of Publishing program. She holds a Master of Library Science degree from the University of Toronto (1978) and trained as a bookseller at Vancouver’s legendary Duthie Books from 1978 to 1982.