Greg Dawson

Non-Member: $13.00 / Member: $8.00. HIDING IN THE SPOTLIGHT: A Musical Prodigy’s Story of Survival, Greg Dawson. When journalist Greg Dawson, then a feature writer/columnist for the Herald-Times newspaper in Bloomington, told his mother, Zhanna, a longtime piano professor at Indiana University who’d ... (more)grown up in the Ukraine, he was planning to write a local-angle story about World War II, she proceeded to tell him a story he’d never heard before: the horrific saga of her family being rousted from their home and sent on a death march when she was 14. Of how she and her younger sister, Frina, were forced to use their prowess as piano prodigies to entertain Nazi soldiers. Zhanna is now living in Atlanta and a member of Congregation Beth Jacob. Hiding in the Spotlight tells Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson’s astonishing, painful and, ultimately, uplifting story by a son who, for most of his life, never knew he was Jewish. THE LOST WIFE, Alyson Richman. Inspiration for The Lost Wife struck novelist Alyson Richman by chance. During a haircut, she overheard the stylist next to her telling a story he had recently heard from another client. That woman had recently attended a wedding where the bride’s grandmother and the groom’s grandfather had not met previously. At the rehearsal dinner the night before, the groom’s grandfather insisted the bride’s grandmother looked hauntingly familiar to him. At the end of the evening, still adamant that her face looked familiar to him, he asked her to roll up her sleeve. There, the six-number tattoo from Auschwitz was marked to her skin. “You were my wife,” he told her. Richman imagines the 60 years of separation between these two, creating an epic love story that begins in glamorous pre-war Prague, but takes a tragic turn as Czechoslovakia is swept under the folds of the Nazi Occupation.

Greg Dawson recounts the extraordinary story of his mother, who as a young girl survived the Holocaust in Berdyansk, Ukraine, through her musical genius. Zhanna Arshanskaya escaped the Nazi death march to Dorbitsky Yar and used her rare musical gift to help her survive. Performing and giving concerts ... (more)for the occupying German troops as they moved throughout Europe, she kept her true identity a secret. Upon her emigration to America, she became one of the first Jewish refugees to enter Julliard. This talk is cosponsored by the Virginia Holocaust Museum and is followed by a book signing.