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The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
January 26, 2022 @ 2:00 pm
A Conversation with Judy Batalion
In 2007 Judy Batalion was researching at the British Library when she came across a dusty old book, Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos). The Yiddish thriller explores the lives of “ghetto girls” who hid revolvers in teddy bears, bribed Nazis with whiskey and pastry and blew up German supply trains. The book inspired Batalion’s The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2021). The Light of Days will be translated into twenty languages.
Speaker Information:
Judy Batalion was born and raised in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Yiddish and Hebrew, and trying to stay warm. She studied the history of science at Harvard then moved to London to pursue a PhD in art history. All the while, she worked as a curator, researcher, editor, lecturer, comic, MC, script-reader, dramaturge, performer, actor, producer, translator, muffin-server, and a temp – at a temp agency. Eventually, Judy transformed these experiences into material. She wrote essays and articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post and many other publications. Her stories about family relationships, the generational transmission of trauma, pathological hoarding and militant minimalism came together in her book White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between (NAL/Penguin, 2016). White Walls was optioned by Warner Brothers, for whom Judy is currently developing the TV series “Cluttered.”