Nina Tumarkin, professor of history at Wellesley College, will present a lecture titled "Tamar's Daughters: Stories of Russian Jewish Women in Exile" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 28, in 203 Meliora Hall on the University of Rochester River Campus. The Russian Studies Program, the Department of History, the Susan B. Anthony Center for Gender and Women's Studies, and the Center for Judaic Studies are sponsoring the event.
Tumarkin's talk will center on a book she is writing about five women who were her forebears. All were born in the Russian Empire in the last quarter of the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th century, and came from Jewish families that had embraced Russian culture. They left Russia for the capital cities of Western Europe; three relocated to New York City before World War II. Tumarkin's book will show how legal, social, political, economic, cultural, and psychological imperatives-as well as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and two world wars-helped shape the contours of their adult lives as exiles from the land of their birth.
Tumarkin has written two other books titled Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, which won the Wilson Prize for best first-book manuscript, and The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. She has been a Fellow at the Harvard University Russian Research Center for a quarter-century, and has taught at Wellesley since 1975. In the mid-1980s, Tumarkin served as a special advisor to the National Security Council and to President Ronald Reagan. In 1985, she was the only woman of six Sovietologists to brief President Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz, and other members of the administration before the president's first summit meeting with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
For more information, call (585) 275-4176.