Klüger to Look Back on Life as an Immigrant

When she arrived in New York in 1947 after having survived several German Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during World War II, Smith College visiting professor Ruth Klüger endured culture shock, poverty and monumental emotional shifts as she settled into her new home and prepared to attend Hunter College.

Klüger's experiences as a child, forcefully deported from her native Austria by Nazi soldiers and imprisoned in their camps, and as one of a huge wave of post-war immigrants in New York, inspired her acclaimed autobiography, "weiter leben: Eine Jugend," published in German in 1992. She is presently translating the book, which last year won the prestigious Heinrich Heine Prize, into English under the title "Still Alive," to be published by the Feminist Press.

On Monday, Oct. 19, at 4:30 p.m., Klüger will discuss her experience as a Jewish immigrant in a lecture titled "An Immigrant Remembers New York in the Late Forties." The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Seelye Hall, Room 106, Smith College.

The city of New York, her adopted home, has played a vital role in Klüger's life, she says. Of Europe, she has "only had bad memories. I have a very strong sense of New York. I feel this is one of my hometowns. It exudes something that's important in me."

After graduating from Hunter College in 1950, Klüger went on to attend graduate school in California and has been a professor of German studies for more than 30 years at the University of Virginia; Princeton University; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of Goettingen in Germany. This semester's William Allan Neilson Professorship is her first appointment at Smith.

Klüger will deliver two more lectures. On Nov. 16, she will talk on "Der Rosenkavalier-An Oedipal Comedy?" and on Dec. 7, she will give a lecture titled "Are History and Literature Strangers or Bedfellows?"