This story is told through the recollections of Lydia Piovarcsy - Steiner, whose parents perished in a concentration camp. Her father, Jozef Steiner, was the original co-owner of the antiquarian bookshop. Lydka herself, even after all these years, tries to come to terms with her past, to overcome it by living an active life and understanding the actions of the man who, in her eyes, is the concrete culprit of the tragedy of the Steiner family - Ľudo Ondrejov.
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ĽUBA LESNÁ graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. Before 1989 she worked as a theater critic, after the Velvet Revolution as a journalist and political commentator, among others at the daily Verejnosť, Radio Free Europe, Slovak Television, the private TV JOJ, the weekly English-language The Slovak Spectator, and others. She moderated the discussion show "Pod Lupou" (Under the Magnifying Glass) on West Slovak Television. She worked as an analyst at the Office of the Government of the Slovak Republic and as an advisor to Prime Minister Iveta Radičová. Currently, she works as an advisor to Environment Minister Jan Budaj and writes blogs.
Ľuba’s most important investigative works include The Kidnapping of the President's Son or A Short History of the Secret Service (1998) that deals with the kidnapping of the son of former Slovak President Michal Kováč that was awarded The Erwin Kisch Prize for Non-Fiction (1999); Being decent is not enough (2020) - interviews with dissident, philosopher and political scientist Miroslav Kusý. In 2017 she published TheMillennium Woman, stories of four women who have lived at different times across the millennia, all accused of crimes they did not commit or are fighting against a hostile and unjust state machine. Vultures versus Clarinet is a docudrama from 2016 about Hartmut Tatz, a young clarinet player who tried to escape to the West in 1986 and was bitten to death by border guard dogs. Confused Identity (2015) is a TV documentary about the Sonnenfelds, the family of Ľuba Lesná. Virtually all who lived in Slovakia were murdered during the Holocaust, but one branch lives in Israel and the US. Lesna's relative, Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, was chief rabbi of Jerusalem in the 1920s.
ALEXANDRA ARON is an international director and producer, based in New York City. She has been at the helm of more than 25 world premiere productions in New York City, at major regional theaters, and internationally from 1990 to the present. Highlights include A Night in the Old Marketplace (music by Frank London, lyrics by Glen Berger, seen in São Paulo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Toronto, Milan, MASS MoCA, and Bard Summerscape among others), Naked Old Man by Murray Schisgal starring David Margulies (EST, NYC), Imagining Madoff by Deb Margolin (Theater J, DC), Eloise and Ray by Stephanie Fleishmann (New Georges), Judith Sloan’s It Can Happen Here, and Salomé: Woman of Valor by Adeena Karasick and Frank London (Vancouver, Toronto, ART’s Oberon Theater). She was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina (1995). She is looking forward to directing the forthcoming Off-Broadway production of Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Ed Mast for Loose Change Productions. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Remote Theater Project and a graduate Wesleyan University.
JULIA SHERWOOD (née Kalinová) was born and grew up in Bratislava. After her forced emigration in 1978 she studied English and Slavonic languages and literature at universities in Cologne and Munich, and then London, where she now lives. For over 20 years she worked for Amnesty International, traveling widely in Eastern and Central Europe and the former USSR following the changes in 1989. From 2008 to 2014, while living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her husband, Peter Sherwood, was a professor at UNC, she took up literary translation from and into Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and English. Her main focus is on translating – jointly with Peter – and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world.
Since 2013 she has served as editor-at-large for Asymptote, an online journal for literary translation, regularly reporting on the literary scene in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. She administers the Facebook group Slovak Literature in English Translation and jointly with fellow translator Magdalena Mullek curates the website slovakliterature.com, launched in 2019 as part of Raising the Velvet Curtain, a series of events she organized to promote Slovak literature and culture in the UK. In 2019 she was awarded the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav prize for translating and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world. Julia’s most recent book-length translations from Slovak are But Crime Does Punish by Jan Johanides and Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrákovová, both published in June 2022.
The program is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
The event is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
