Todd Hasak-Lowy and Jennifer Cohen
Evanston Writer Todd Hasak-Lowy Discusses His New Translation from the Hebrew, “Aquarium”
On Wednesday, April 28th at 6:30 PM, The Book Stall welcomes Evanston-based writer, translator, and creative writing professor Todd Hasak-Lowy for a virtual event. He will be discussing his new translation of Aquarium, originally published in Hebrew in 2016 by Israeli novelist Yaara Shehori. She won the Bernstein Prize for the best original Hebrew-language work of fiction for Aquarium in 2017. Leading Hebrew-to-English translator Jessica Cohen will join Mr. Hasak-Lowy to talk about the novel, as well as the perils and joys of translation. This program is free and open to the public. The purchase of Aquarium from The Book Stall helps keep our independent bookstore running and ensures an array of fascinating programming to come.
About the Book: Sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman are deaf. Their parents–beautiful, despondent Anna; fearsome and admired Alex–are deaf, too. Alex, a scrap metal collector and sometime prophet, opposes any attempt to integrate with the hearing world; to escape their destructive influence, the girls are educated at home. Deafness is no disability, their father says, but an alternative way of life, preferable by far to that of the strident, hypocritical hearing.
Living in a universe of their own creation, feared by and disdainful of the other children on their block, Lili and Dori grow up semi-feral. Lili writes down everything that happens–just the facts. And Dori, the reader, follows her older sister wherever she goes. United against a hostile and alien world, the girls and their parents watch the hearing like they would fish in an aquarium. But when the hearing world intrudes, and a devastating secret is revealed, the cracks that begin to form in the sisters’ world will have consequences that span the rest of their lives.
Todd Hasak-Lowy is an American writer, translator, and professor of creative writing and literature at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. He is the author of The Task of This Translator, a short-story collection; Captives, a novel; a narrative memoir for young adults, Somewhere There Is Still a Sun, cowritten with the Holocaust survivor Michael Gruenbaum; and several books for younger readers. Hasak-Lowy lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters.
Jessica Cohen’s first book-length translation was published in 2003, and she’s worked with some of Israel’s finest writers, including David Grossman, Amos Oz, and Etgar Keret, among many others, as well as with prominent screenwriters such as Ari Folman and Ron Leshem. Her translations have been published in English by leading U.S. publishers. Visit her website for more information.
Upcoming Events
Poverty, by America (Event 1 of 2)
Matthew Desmond, Ph.D.
Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Poverty, by America (Event 2 of 2)
Matthew Desmond, Ph.D.
Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Alex Kotlowitz
Bestselling author, journalist, and professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society
Arline T. Geronimus, Sc.D.
Professor in the School of Public Health and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan
Doriane C. Miller, MD
Professor of Medicine and the inaugural director of the Center for Community Health and Vitality and the director of Health Equity Integration for the Institute of Translational Medicine at the University of Chicago
ON ZOOM