Speaker: Glenn Kurtz


 
Author Glenn Kurtz will speak about this award winning book, Three Minutes in Poland. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author’s grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community—an entire culture—annihilated in the Holocaust.

Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz’s four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather’s haunting images. His search took him across the United States, to Canada, England, Poland and Israel, to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield.
Glenn Kurtz's his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Tufts University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and holds a PhD from Stanford University in comparative literature. He has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and New York University.


 


In addition, at 12:30 in the Kovno Room: Bring your lunch and meet with fellow JGS members and experts in an informal setting to share research stories and ask questions.