Savyon Liebrecht on "The Creative Process"

On March 26 at 7 pm, Savyon Liebrecht will deliver the Newton Lecture in Judaic Studies at Boston University. This lecture, titled “The Creative Process,” will be held at the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at BU, with a dessert reception to follow. About Savyon Liebrecht: Savyon Liebrecht was born in Munich in 1948. She moved to Israel with her parent—Polish survivors of the Holocaust—in 1950; indeed, the challenges facing the children of survivors figure prominently in her fiction, above all perhaps in her debut collection of stories Apples from the Desert (1986). Liebrecht studied literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Liebrecht has an uncanny ability to describe and understand the inner and outer lives of women. As one critic has noted, her female protagonists—heroines and narrators, grandmothers, mothers, daughters and wives—are able to “win by opening themselves to the other,” across national, class, and religious boundaries. Her short fiction, novellas, novels and plays have been translated into German, Italian, English, French, Chinese, Estonian, and published in anthologies around the world. She has won numerous awards, among them the Alterman Literary Prize for “Apples from the Desert”(1987), the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature (1992,1999), and the Playwright of the Year Award (2004 and 2006). Two of Liebrecht’s plays will be performed on the BU campus this semester: Freud’s Women (upcoming at the BU Playwrights’ Theater on March 30, 2014) and The Banality of Love (on April 28, 2014, in commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day).