Glorious People: An Evening with Sasha Marianna Salzmann & Marianne Hirsch

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading by Sasha Marianna Salzmann from their acclaimed novel (Pushkin Press, 2025, in a translation by Imogen Taylor), followed by a conversation between the author and Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and there will be signing following the program.

For Lena, childhood summers meant training to be a good socialist at Pioneer camp, singing songs in praise of Lenin. But when perestroika shatters her world, all must be unlearned. Lena’s corner of the USSR is suddenly Ukraine: there is a McDonalds in Moscow’s Red Square and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops.

For her friend Tatyana, survival in her changing homeland requires new skills: bullet dodging, business sense and a knack for bribery and corruption. When both women head West in search of new beginnings, their homesickness for a vanished land is inherited by their rebellious daughters, caught between forging their own identities and untangling the rich histories of the mothers who raised them.

"Glorious People is hypnotic, sweeping, and more relevant than ever. The mothers and daughters will stick with you long after you turn the last page of this mesmerizing, sharp, and devastating novel. They are searching for meaning and belonging as immigrants, mothers, wives, professionals, and citizens of a complex and ever-changing world. This novel offers a fresh take on the Soviet diaspora that offers both a meaningful critique and a semblance of much-needed hope for the future."- Maria Kuznetsova, author of Something Unbelievable

About the participants:

writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her work draws on literary, artistic and theoretical sources, as well as on her own family memories as the daughter of Holocaust survivors who spent her childhood in communist Romania. Her books include The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989); Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997); The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012). Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2019) were both co-authored with Leo Spitzer. She recently co-edited Women Mobilizing Memory and Imagining Everyday Life: Encounters with Vernacular Photography (2020). Hirsch is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University, a former president of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently working on a book about the reparative potentials of memory.

is a playwright, novelist, curator, and director. They were the co-founder of the culture magazine freitext and the artistic director of the experimental stage STUDIO Я. Salzmann also co-founded NIDS – New Institute for Drama, where they gave workshops on political writing. Their theatrical work is translated, shown, and awarded in over 20 countries. Their essays appear in newspapers such as Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Neue Züricher Zeitung. In 2017, Salzmann finished their first novel, Beside Myself, which was translated into 16 languages and won two major German awards for best debut novel. Beside Myself was on the short list for the German Book Prize, Premio Strega Europeo, and Central European Literature Award ANGELUS. In 2020, Sasha Marianna Salzmann was the winner of the Art Prize in category performing arts of the Akademie der Künste. In 2021, their second novel Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (Glorious People) was nominated for the German Book Prize and won Preis der Literaturhäuser and Hermann Hesse Literature Award in 2022. In 2024 they were awarded the Kleist Preis for their writing. Glorious People appeared with Pushkin Press in 2025, in a translation by Imogen Taylor.

Attendance:

While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.

Accessibility:

The first floor of Deutsches Haus at NYU, where our auditorium is located and where a majority of our events take place, can be made wheelchair accessible through the use of our ramp. If you would like for a Deutsches Haus staff member to set up this ramp for you, please call our Front Desk at +1 212-998-8660 upon your arrival. For any other accessibility-related questions or concerns, please email us at [email protected] or call us at +1 212-998-8660.

"'Glorious People:' An Evening with Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Marianne Hirsch" is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Host or Publisher Deutsches Haus at NYU