Hello Peers,

I have just published with Common Ground (New Directions in the Humanities) a memoir/biography entitled, After Poland: A Memoir Because of Primo Levi. The book combines scholary essays with poems and autobiographical essays. The autobiographical portions become reflective pieces on history and the individual's relationship to the past through relationship with writers, photographers, poets, and painters.

A fellowship to Poland, focused on the Jewish history of Poland and Poland through and after Communism, allowed me to visit Auschwitz with Levi's story at the forefront of my journey--down and inward. The engagement with Levi's work, the time in Poland, and the days at Auschwitz congeal to allow for a deep exploration on writing, Jewish history, trauma and the making of art, Poland's recovery and memorialization in the post-war years up to the present time, and an increasingly profound understanding of self in relationship to these areas of study and immersion.

I'm currently writing and researching for a second book, The Bright Dream: A Writer's Return to Italy. This is a novelistic memoir with historiographic elements, that charts my journey from study as student in Florence in the 1980s to a return to Italy in 2018. On that return journey, I travel to Turin, birth and death place of Primo Levi, to trace his forty-year writing career once repatriated to Italy from Poland, where he was in interned at Auschwitz.

I look forward to engaging in CG Scholar networks and to meeting you and reading many of your publications.

Warm regards,

Cheryl

cherylchaffin.com