Susan Suleiman — Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood

Watch author Susan Suleiman's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose book store in Washington, D.C.

A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives.

At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.

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Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She graduated from Barnard College and obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard, where she went on to a long and distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature. Suleiman has published more than a dozen scholarly books and over a hundred articles in international journals, as well as book reviews in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of autobiographical works, including the acclaimed memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherboo (1996) and its new sequel, Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood.

Suleiman has won many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1990, she received the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and in 1992 she was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms. In April 2018, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.