Chasing the King of Hearts: The Museum of Jewish Heritage

Featuring Philip Boehm, David Samuels, and Natalia Aleksiun

Philip Boehm has translated over thirty novels and plays from German and Polish, by authors such as Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Ilija Trojanow. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as numerous awards including the Found in Translation Award for his rendering of Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts. He also works as a playwright and stage director and is the founding Artistic Director of Upstream Theater in St. Louis.

Natalia Aleksiun is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She studied East European and Jewish history in Poland, where she received her first doctoral degree at Warsaw University, as well as Oxford, Jerusalem and New York, where she received her second doctoral degree at NYU. She is co-chair of a Scholars’ Working Group on Women and Gender in Jewish History at the Center for Jewish History in New York. She published a monograph titled Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (in Polish), and her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust will be published with Littman in 2018.

David Samuels is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine who is known as one of America's leading narrative journalists. His long reported articles have appeared in Harper's, n+1, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines in the US, France, the U.K., Japan, and other countries. He also serves as Literary Editor at Tablet.