Book Talk: Echoes of Exile: A Family’s Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War
WEBINAR:
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
12pm-1:15pm (US Eastern Time)
Echoes of Exile reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Daniela Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Drawing on research in various archives, including the JDC Archives, her resulting work combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Spenser’s work reveals the difficult choices her mother and family faced, the tests to their loves and loyalties, and the lingering scars of exile. More than a family history, it weaves personal and historical narratives with mundane and momentous threads to create a fresh, distinctive fabric.
Daniela Spenser is a British-Czech historian and research fellow at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City, where she has worked since 1980. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Dr. Spenser has published Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International (2011) and In Combat: The Life of Vicente Lombardo Toledano (2020). She also co-edited In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (2008). In recognition of her research contributions, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
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