On Wednesday 25 November at 18.00 in Rutherford Lecture Theatre One, Dr Elizabeth Schächter will give a Rutherford Grass Roots lecture entitled Exile’s Children: Vienna to London

Edith Mahler and Hans Schächter were born in Vienna to middle-class Jewish families. They studied medicine at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1929. The Anschluss changed their lives: they fled Austria in 1938 and came to England. The lecture, drawing on family archives, tells the story of that flight and their first years of exile, as they faced an uncertain future.

Dr Elizabeth Schächter is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature and Italian in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University. She has published widely on Italian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular several seminal studies of the writer Italo Svevo including Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste (2000). More recently her research has focused on Italian Jewry, resulting in the monograph The Jews of Italy, 1848-1915: Between Tradition and Transformation (2011).

Lecture free and open to all.