Listernick Gives Talk at NeMLA
Dr. Joan Listernick, one of our PT lecturers in French, presented a paper at the recent NeMLA conference in Buffalo, New York. Her topic was the theme of resilience in the posthumous unpublished memoir of her Parisian aunt, Dr. Mireille Zonis (1936-2021), a pediatrician.
Dr. Zonis had fled her native Bessarabia during the Shoah, living for a while in Siberia, then in Israel before arriving in Paris in her teens. After her passing, her closest friends discovered essays and poems scattered throughout her apartment. These texts, woven together, reveal her sense of both belonging to and feeling separate from, the Parisian society of her day.