About the Author
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
Writer, teacher, scholar, and public speaker, Patricia Klindienst has made the American immigrant experience her subject for more than a decade.
After earning degrees from Hampshire College, Boston University, and Stanford University, she began her career as an interdisciplinary scholar at Yale, publishing ground-breaking feminist re-interpretations of classical myths and biblical stories, including “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” “Ritual Work on Human Flesh: Livy’s Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic,” and “‘Intolerable Language’: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery.” An award-winning scholar and teacher, she left the profession and began to write for a broader audience.
Her first book of nonfiction, THE EARTH KNOWS MY NAME, tells the stories of fifteen ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens. Praised by readers as diverse as Dr. Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez, Klindienst’s eloquent and passionate rendering of the voices of ethnic peoples has been called “An original and exemplary kind of cultural study” by Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale, who characterizes her book as “…essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship, imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.”
She received an American Book Award for 2007.
Her new project is a traveling exhibit of the same title, NO ONE REMEMBERS ALONE: MEMORY, MIGRATION, AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY. Beginning with the story of two young lovers, Abram and Sophie, who fled Czarist Russia following the failed revolution of 1905, the exhibit recreates the migration story of an entire family of Russian Jews scattered across three continents. Drawn from hundreds of archival photographs, postcards, and documents entrusted to her by dozens of family members, NO ONE REMEMBERS ALONE opened at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, then traveled to the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. It travels next to the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Research Center of Florida.
A book with the same title is in the works.
Selections from Abram & Sophie’s story are now part of the permanent exhibition in THE RED STAR LINE MUSEUM, which opened on the docks of Antwerp in 2013. Their story is also included in the RED STAR LINE DOCUMENTARY FILM and a traveling exhibition, VIA ANTWERP: THE ROAD TO ELLIS ISLAND, at the ELLIS ISLAND IMMIGRATION MUSEUM from May 26 through September 4, 2016.
Patricia lives in Guilford, Connecticut with her husband, Louis Mackall.