“Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film”

Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, andartifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and
surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish
hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, this home movie became the sole
remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. Pursuing
the significance of this brief film became a riveting exploration of
memory, loss, and improbable survival.

Courtesy of The Book Den, copies of Three Minutes in Poland will be
available for purchase and signing at this event.

Speaker Profile:

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost
World in a 1938 Family Film, which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The
New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and NPR. The Wall Street Journal praised it
as “captivating” and The Los Angeles Times described it as “breathtaking.”
His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Southwest Review,
and elsewhere.

Reviews of Three Minutes in Poland:

“In the pages of Glenn Kurtz’s marvelous book, the ghosts from those three
minutes are breathtakingly brought to life.”
–Louise Steinman, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2014.

“Both a memoir and an impressive feat of historical research, Three Minutes
in Poland documents Kurtz’s four-year search for surviving Nasielskers, who
he hopes can piece together a narrative from the fragments of film…. In a
genre so often preoccupied with the recitation of horrors, Three Minutes in
Poland is the rare work that seems more about people than about ghosts.”
?Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post, January 16, 2015.

“… a haunting web of contingency.”
–The New Yorker, February 16, 2015.

“…in this captivating book, Mr. Kurtz tries to reconstruct Jewish
Nasielsk, knowing he will fail?not only because he arrives too late but
because memory is by nature incomplete.”
–Dara Horn, The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2014.

Sponsored by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia
in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary
Humanities Center. Cosponsored by UCSB Department of Religious
Studies, Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa
Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.

hm 4/9/15