Eleanor Reissa in conversation: Discovering a Holocaust legacy
Eleanor Reissa is coming to Sydney. She may not be a household name yet, but she will be for those lucky enough to see her in conversation with literary critic and seasoned interviewer Scott Whitmont.
Eleanor Reissa
The event is at 2pm on Wednesday, 14 August at the B’nai B’rith Centre, 17 Barker St, Kensington and is presented by B’nai Brith NSW, Courage to Care NSW and Melbourne Jewish Book Week.
In New York, where Eleanor was born and raised, she is most certainly a star. She has sung on every Broadway stage, performed in countless plays, and most recently starred as the matriarch in ‘The Zwieflers’, winner of the Cannes TV series award, 2024. The remarkable aspect of this German production is that it is to be aired not just in German, but also in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, Eleanor’s mother tongue.
But of all Eleanor’s talents, including being a playwright, songstress, actress, director, choreographer, and author, it is her final achievement—the publication of “The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey”—of which she is most proud. The book is a profound discovery of the esteemed, courageous, and admirable young man her father, a slave in Auschwitz and a Holocaust ‘fighter’, had been.
“The Letters Project” is compelling from the outset. Told with the self-effacing candour of someone with enough insight and perspective to reflect on her own foibles, the reader is swept along a retrospective awakening. Why did her father always sign his letters to her mother and to her with his full name, Chaskell Schusselberg?
Only through painfully tracing the footsteps of his life in Germany, the torturous years in concentration camps, the eradication of his identity and of all that he stood for—his career, his first wife and daughter murdered, and the perceived rejection by his young son sent to the UK to survive—is it any wonder this man was putting his stamp, his very name, in full and in print?
Eleanor’s story is moving; it is soulful and full of surprising revelations and uncanny events that, once pieced together, provide a depth of understanding of her own personhood. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Eleanor Reissa, in conversation with Scott Whitmont about her life as the child of Holocaust survivors, as a creative free spirit subconsciously evading a burden too sad, until finally coming to terms with her father’s life—a Holocaust story that is also her own.
—
Don’t miss this special opportunity to hear Eleanor Reissa in Sydney – book now: https://events.humanitix.com/new-york-meets-sydney
