Object of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams

About the book:
Advance Praise for Objects of Remembrance: “An intimate and provocative meditation on Jewish life between the old and the new world.” - Bernhard Schlink, German jurist and writer, author of The Reader.

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Monroe Price recounts the continuing impact of European identities as families, cast from their homes by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, struggle to find their way in a new and challenging environment. Price was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938 and left when he was seven months old. In a series of reflections, Price seeks to recreate the Vienna of his infancy and the socialization of his family, and other Jewish and Viennese immigrants, in the United States. As he traces the particular path of his own life, Price reveals a more universal story of adjustment, and the relationship between a marginal community and the drama of American citizenship.

"Monroe Price has written a truly powerful book. [I]t illuminates the experience of exile and displacement with rare immediacy. A tribute to individual and cultural endurance, we glimpse the unique patterns of the Austrian-Jewish diaspora and are reminded of what could and should have been." - Matti Bunzl, anthropologist and chronicler of Viennese modernity (CEU Press, 2009 )

Monroe E. Price is Chair and co-founder of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University; Director of the Center for Global Communications Studies (CGCS), Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; and Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Among his many books are Media and Sovereignty and Television, the Public Sphere and National Identity.

Introduction by Ellen Hume (Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at CMCS)

Reception and book signing to follow.