Elisa New, author of “Jacob’s Cane,” will speak and sign copies of her book on April 5 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Elisa New, author of “Jacob’s Cane,” will speak and sign copies of her book on April 5 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The free public talk will be at 5:30 p.m. at the Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in the Graham Memorial Building, Room 039. The building is off East Franklin Street near the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.
The book (Basic Books, 2009) recounts stories from New’s family tree. Drawn to an image of her great-grandfather’s ornately carved cane, she embarked on a journey to discover the origins of the precious family heirloom. Treading the paths of her ancestors, she traveled from Baltimore to the Baltic to London to find and understand an immigrant world profoundly affected by modern German culture, from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust.
“In ‘Jacob’s Cane,’ Elisa New has created a breathtaking exploration of her roots – a detective story written with the lyrical heart of a poet and an historian’s keen eye for detail,” writes NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell.
New is a professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.
Her talk is sponsored by Honors Carolina and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
For more information, call (919) 966-5110.
Web: http://www.jacobscane.org
Photo: http://uncnews.unc.edu/images/stories/news/humanities/2011/new_elisaby%20%28dov%20friedmann%29.jpg
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu