Personal History: Searching for the Past in Home Movies

YIVO’s Letters to Afar video art installation at the Museum of the City of New York featured home movies from the YIVO Archives made by American Jews who traveled back to their hometowns in Poland during the 1920s and 1930s. What can we learn from and what are we looking for in these films when we look at them so many years later?

On March 10, 2015 writers Dani Shapiro and Glenn Kurtz appeared at YIVO in a program in conjunction with the Letters to Afar exhibition to discuss their own family films from prewar Poland, their search to identify individuals in the films, and how they used the home movies to deepen their understanding of a vanished world. The Shapiro footage of Horodok, Poland, became the basis for YIVO’s 1981 documentary, Image Before My Eyes, and the Kurtz family film of a visit to Nasielsk, Poland inspired Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, which was voted “Best of 2014” by The New Yorker and National Public Radio.

The panel was moderated by YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives Roberta Newman, who was the curator of YIVO’s film and photo collections from 1988-1992.

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His first book, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Vintage Books), received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Kurtz also hosts “Conversations on Practice,” a discussion series about the writing process and the writer’s life. Guests have included Jennifer Egan, Patti Smith, Adam Gopnik, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Francine Prose. He has taught at Stanford University and New York University.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Vogue, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, among others, and have been broadcast on “This American Life.” She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, Wesleyan, and currently teaches private workshops internationally. She is the founder of the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy. Her newest book is Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life.

Watch a video of the program: