(a Gramercy Books event)
Join National Jewish Book Award Winner of The Girl From Berlin Ron Balson to learn more about his powerful and dramatic WWII novel, A Place to Hide, which explores the deeply-moving actions of an ordinary man who resolves, under perilous circumstances, to make a difference. Balson will be in conversation with noted Holocaust historian and author Robin Judd.
Registration
The purchase of A Place to Hide waives the $5 registration fee.
JewishColumbus, Jewish Community Center, Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University, and the Department of History at Ohio State are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this program.
Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family who place him into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. In 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, Teddy is re-assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam to replace fleeing staff.
Teddy’s job is to process visa applications, and by 1939, refugees from Nazi-conquered Poland, Austria, and other countries are desperate to secure safe passage to America. As Hitler sweeps through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Holland, the screws tighten and law after virulent law is passed to threaten the lives, indeed the very existence of the Jewish people. When Teddy and his girlfriend Sara are introduced to an orphaned young girl named Katy, who has been abandoned on the grounds of a nursery school, they agree to adopt her. Teddy comes to realize that he holds the key to saving lives, whether five, fifty, or five hundred—and makes the dangerous and selfless decision to join with underground groups and use his position at the Consulate to rescue those with no other avenue of escape.
Powerful and dramatic, National Jewish Book Award winner Ronald H. Balson’s A Place to Hide explores the deeply moving actions of an ordinary man who resolves, under perilous circumstances, to make a difference.
Ronald H. Balson is an attorney, professor, and writer. His novel The Girl From Berlin won the National Jewish Book Award and was the Illinois Reading Council's adult fiction selection for their Illinois Reads program. He is also the author of Defending Britta Stein, Eli’s Promise, Karolina's Twins, The Trust, Saving Sophie, and the international bestseller Once We Were Brothers. He has appeared on many television and radio programs and has lectured nationally and internationally on his writing. He lives in Chicago.
Robin Judd is a specialist in Jewish, transnational, and gender history, with particular interests in Holocaust studies and the history of antisemitism. She is the author of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust (winner of the National Jewish Book Awards for Women's Studies & Writing Based on Archival Material and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award) and Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933. Judd is the Past President of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest international learned society and professional organization representing Jewish studies and is a voting member of Ohio's Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission. She has received seven teaching awards, including the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
