Esther Dischereit
German Poet and Writer

"Übungen - Übungen jüdisch zu sein,
Prosa, Lyrik, Essays
[Lessons in Being Jewish: Prose, Verse, Essays]"

(Discussion will be in English)

Friday, 6 October 2006
12:30 noon
336 Ingraham Hall

Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies
the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
the Department of German
and the Center for European Studies
Esther Dischereit was born in 1952 in Germany. She studied in Frankfurt am Main and was trained as a teacher, though she worked in the metal industry and later became a typesetter, and finally worked for the German trade unions. Poet, novelist, essayist, stage and radio dramatist, her works include Joëmi‘s Table, Merryn (prose); When My Golem Opened the Door, Hoarfrosted Mouth and Other News (Poems); Lessons in Being Jewish, With Eichmann on the Stock Exchange (Essays).
She was a fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European and Jewish Studies and has lectured widely in the United States. She has won stipends from the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art, the Stiftung Preussische Seehandlung in Berlin, the Berlin Senate and the Erwin-Strassmann-Stiftung. In the 1990s she founded the WordMusic Group. A symposion about Esther Dischereit's work was held at the University of Wales, Swansea, in 2003 and she was writer in residence at Deutsches Haus, New York University, in 2004.

English publications include: "Joëmi's Table" (in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany – An Anthology, by Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, University of Nebraska Press, 2002). Esther Dischereit is also presented in: Nothing Makes You Free – Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, by Melvin Bukiet (W.W.Norton & Company, 2002); Jewish Voices German Words, by Elena Lappin (Catbird Press, 1994); "No Exit from this Jewry" (in Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany Life and Literature since 1989, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, New York University Press, 1994); "The Cyclist" (poems translated by Iain Galbraith, in Dimensions 2/3 Contemporary German-Language Literature by Ingo R. Stoehr and Louise E. Stoehr, 2003); and "A Day or a Day" (translated by Katherina Hall/Tom Cheesman, in Index on Censorship, 2005). Her poems have also been published in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung and in Spanish and Polish magazines.