Fee: Free.
Registration: This discussion takes place via Zoom; advance registration required. Click here to register. Click here to see all individual dates.
The Lynden/HOME Refugee Steering Committee book discussion group, moderated by Lynden’s Kim Khaira, is for those interested in firsthand accounts of displacement. We consider works of non-fiction and fiction, including autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works, by writers who have faced or are facing forced displacement as refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. Where stories of persecution, historical trauma, and loss of livelihood are effortlessly conveyed by storytellers, journalists, and humanitarians who search out or stumble upon the lives of refugees, we seek out the words of those to whom these stories belong: the narrators who are the closest to their own stories, and the stories of their people, friends, family and, of course, refugees. Newcomers always welcome!
October 2024-January 2025: My American Dream: A Journey from Fascism to Freedom by Barbara Sommer Feigin. Through the posthumous discovery of her father's secret journal, Feigin is able to begin her chronological story with her parents’ escape from Nazi Germany. Only a toddler at the time of their departure, Feigin pieces together her family’s early history. She then shifts to her own story, a tale of growing up in America and her subsequent struggles as she embarked on a corporate career in New York City in the 1960s, rising to become a top executive in the advertising field.
February 2025-April 2025: Aednan: An Epic, by Linnea Axelsson. This novel-in-verse by a Sámi-Swedish writer was originally published in Swedish and Northern Sámi in 2018, with the English translation following in 2024. Axelsson's “stories within stories” discuss the loss of land of Indigenous Sàmi people from northern Scandinavia and the cultural displacement that crosses generations and borders.
May 2025-August 2025: Solito, by Javier Zamora. This new memoir, Solito, narrates the immigration story of Zamora in 1999 when he was a nine-year-old child travelling from La Herradura, El Salvador, through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert to be reunited with his parents in the US.
