Come join us and the Austrian Cultural Forum for a meet & greet with Maja Haderlap and Tess Lewis, author and translator of the award-winning Angel of Oblivion. The event will take place on Wednesday September 14th at 8:00pm on the rooftop of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. More information is available here.
Angel of Oblivion is based on the experiences of Maja Haderlap’s family and the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria, many of whom fought as partisans against the Nazis during the Second World War. The story centers on the experiences of a young girl learning to navigate the terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian, a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliation, and German, an escape from her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps which her grandmother barely survived and many other family members didn’t. Engaging with themes of tolerance and integration of minority communities, the burden of history, the effects of conflicts on survivors and their children, and language’s role in shaping identity, Haderlap’s novel strikes at problems of paramount importance to our world today.