Special Notable Author Event!
Ela Stein Weissberger
Holocaust Survivor and Coauthor of
The Cat With the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in Terezin
Wednesday, December 19, 7 pm
FREE Tickets Now Available at the Library
Ela Stein Weissberger was 11 years old when she arrived at the Terezin concentration camp, just outside Prague in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. As she remembered in a 2000 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, she, her sister and grandmother were greeted upon their arrival at the camp by the sight of several young men, hanging dead in the town square.
“I remember they took us out and said, ‘this will happen to you if you try to escape,’” recalled Ms. Weissberger. “We thought that ghetto means that we would only be concentrated there. We didn’t know about death camps."
During her imprisonment Ms. Weissberger auditioned for a part in the children’s opera Brundibar about a gang of kids who take on a greedy organ grinder. Winning the part of The Cat, Ms. Weissberger went on to play her role in all 55 performances.
She is among the few survivors of the original cast. In 2006, she worked with author Susan Goldman Rubin to craft a personal memoir of her experiences. The Cat With the Yellow Star is a powerful, moving book chronicling how the young prisoners rehearsed and performed the opera. As Booklist notes, this is “… a hopeful message about the power of music, art, friends, and teachers, but the account never denies the fact that transports were always leaving for the death camps and some of the prisoners did not survive.”
Tickets Now Available
FREE tickets to Ms. Weissberger’s FREE event at 7 pm on December 19 are available by calling the Guilderland Public Library’s Adult Reference Department at 456-2400 x 7 or by e-mailing info@guilderlandpublic.info |
Private Reception Enables You to Meet Ms. Weissberger Personally
A limited amount of tickets to that evening’s 6 pm private, paid reception with Ms. Weissberger are also available. Tickets to the paid reception can be purchased by visiting the Library, by calling 456-2400 x 12, or by e-mailing Mark Curiale at curialem@uhls.lib.ny.us. Tickets are $35 per person or $50 per couple. Proceeds from the reception are used to underwrite the Carol J. Hamblin Notable Author Speakers Series. Both of these are very special and popular events. We encourage you to call early for tickets.
Ms. Weissberger’s appearance at the Library is of a piece: she will speak to students at Guilderland’s Farnsworth Middle School on the afternoon of December 19. On December 20, she will speak before the opening night performance of Brundibar at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady.
See the Young Cast Rehearse Brundibar at the Library, Wednesday, December 5
David Griggs Janower, who will conduct Brundibar at Proctor’s, will be holding a special rehearsal of the opera at the Guilderland Public Library at 6 pm, December 5. The cast of Brundibar is made up of children from Guilderland and surrounding areas. The public is invited to attend this rehearsal. As this is one of the first rehearsals, you’ll get to see the show being put together.
Part of the Carol J. Hamblin Notable Author Speakers Series
The Library is honored to welcome Ms. Weissberger as part of the Carol J. Hamblin Notable Author Speakers Series. Over the past several years this series has hosted such leading authors as Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph E. Persico, Gregory Maguire, and Jeff Shaara. The series is underwritten with the generous support of the Guilderland Library Foundation.
Questions about this program can be directed to the Library’s Public Information Specialist, Mark Curiale. He can be reached at 518-456-2400 x 12, or via e-mail at curialem@uhls.lib.ny.us
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