Alan Astro (Ph.D. Yale University, 1985) has been a professor at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas for over 35 years. He is the author of Autour du yiddish de Paris à Buenos Aires (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021) and Understanding Samuel Beckett (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990; paperback ed. 2011). Astro co-edited, with Malena Chinski, Splendor, Decline, and Recovery of Yiddish in Latin America (Leyden: Brill, 2018).
Annette Wieviorka (b. 1948) is a major French historian of the Holocaust. Her work highlights the specificity of the Shoah in the context of Nazi and Vichy crime generally.
Charlotte Wardi (1928-2018) was one of the first significant scholars of the representation of the Jews and the Holocaust in French and other fiction. A young survivor of Auschwitz who grew up and was educated in France, she taught for three decades at the University of Haifa and continued to be active in her retirement.
Mimi Pinzón published a wide variety of acclaimed literary works in Yiddish, including her childhood novel Der hoyf on fenster, along with numerous Yiddish periodicals in Argentina and elsewhere. Pinzón is arguably the sole significant Yiddish writer who spent none of her school years in Eastern Europe.
Rosa Palatnik, born in a shtetl near Lublin, was a prolific Yiddish author. She told stories of Jewish immigrants struggling to integrate into new lives in Poland, France, and Brazil, the three countries in which she lived. Her stories were witty and rich, with a complex relationship to the Jewish past and tradition, especially after the Holocaust.
Paula Jacques (b. 1949) is a French radio hostess and a novelist. Her works, which feature memorable female protagonists, most often portray the French-speaking Jewish community of Egypt prior to their expulsion at the time of the Suez crisis.
Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”
Barbara (Monique Andrée Serf) was a French singer and composer whose melancholy style rose to national significance. Born in Paris in 1930, after World War II Barbara studied music, rising to fame in the 1960s. Her Jewish identity and wartime experience as a child influenced her non-conformist persona as an artist, and through her song lyrics, she advocated for Franco-German reconciliation.
