PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Memorable autobiographies, experiences told through the eyes and words of the author, are powerful evocations not just of a person, but a time and place, vividly transporting us inside the world of another to experience life as they did.
Documentary filmmaker and writer Sara Lukinson looks at three remarkable lives filled with joys, hopes, war, exile, family, and the complexities of the human heart. Each writer recounts lost worlds and the unexpected lives of their youth: a colorful family in Egypt; ill-fated liberal Russian aristocrats; and, writing from the trenches of World War I, a soldier-poet tells of war from the ground level.
Each session includes readings from the featured work and archival film clips and stills.
Please Note: Individual sessions are available for individual purchase.
MAR 22 Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman
This richly colored memoir looks at growing up in a colorful, sometimes eccentric Egyptian family in cosmopolitan Alexandria and their eventually forced exile. This beautifully told story, evocative and affectionate, is tinged with melancholy for a lost world and childhood.
APR 5 Speak Memory by Vladmir Nabokov
This book is often referred to as one of the most beautifully written memoirs of our time—or any other. It recalls lost worlds and new lives as memories conjured like film images floating across the page. The book begins with Nabokov’s wealthy, progressive Russian youth, an escape to war-torn Europe, and the ship that will bring him to America.
APR 19 Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
Written by one of the great poets of the 20th century, this is one of the first books ever written about war from the soldier’s point of view. It provided powerful personal insights into the realities of WWI and the end of an era of British life.
Lukinson, whose films have received three Emmys and seven Writer’s Guild Awards, teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
3 sessions
PATRON INFORMATION
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