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Title"Sara's Century" Podcast Explores Jewish and Russian History
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From the SEELANGS listserv:

Announcing “Sara’s Century,” a new podcast produced at Rutgers University-Camden that chronicles the life of a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union Now available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and at http://sarascentury.blogs.rutgers.edu/.

About the podcast: The twelve 30-minute episodes are based on interviews Laurie Bernstein, who recently retired from Rutgers’ Department of History, recorded with Sara Mebel (b. 1919) in 2002. They include narration and explanations of the historical context of Sara’s life, much of it using her own words translated by Laurie and voiced by Julia Zavadsky of the Department of Fine Arts at Rutgers-Camden. Robert Emmons, Jr., a documentary filmmaker in Fine Arts, produced the finished episodes, which were released in 2018. About Sara: Sara Mebel, who currently lives in a Philadelphia nursing home, will soon turn 100 years old. Her story is somewhat of a short course in Soviet history, bridging her birth in Gomel just a few days after a pogrom in March 1919 and her emigration to the United States on, of all days, September 11, 2001. Sara endured the loss of her father to Stalin's purges, near-starvation during World War II, and other hardships that were part and parcel of the experience of urbanized, educated Jews in Moscow. She survived all these things, but Boris Yeltsin's economic "shock therapy" and the free-for-all of popular antisemitism in the USSR of 1990s, when she was already in her late 70s, were Sara's last straw. Upon her arrival in the United States, she moved to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she lived with Laurie and her husband Bob Weinberg, whose mother was Sara’s cousin, for nearly two-and-one-half years. “Sara’s Century” will be of interest to both scholars and students of Russian, Jewish, and women's history, as well as to non-specialists. The website includes photos of Sara Mebel and her family, letters, family trees, and transcripts of the episodes. 

Lindenmeyr, A. [SEELANGS] New Podcast Available. SEELANGS listserv (SEELANGS@LISTSERV.UA.EDU, 20 Jan 2019).

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