Book Launch with Marika Sosnowski

Join us for an exciting evening at Berkelouw Paddington, as we celebrate the release of 58 Facets by Marika Sosnowski. Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time. Marika will be in conversation with Shadi Rouhshahbaz and Rifaie Tammas.

This event is free by RSVPs are essential.

About the Book:

When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened ... stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook.

58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski's grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.

About the Author:

Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist at Melbourne Law School and the granddaughter of Polish and Dutch Holocaust survivors. She went to Syria in 2007, primarily to eat makdous, hummus and ghazl al banat, and has worked on Syria – its revolution, war, governance and legal systems – ever since.

About the In Conversation Hosts:

Shadi Rouhshahbaz is an Iranian peacebuilder, feminist researcher and futurist.  With lived experience across six countries, her career has taken her from Iran to Australia through the Mediterranean and the USA. She studies the futures of intergenerational feminist leadership in peace and security in the Middle East and within the United Nations. Shadi founded PeaceMentors, Iran’s first young-women-led peacebuilding initiative. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and an Associate Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute.

Rifaie Tammas is a Syrian researcher and practitioner with over a decade of experience working on policy, social impact, and international development across Syria, Turkey, and Australia. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Sydney and has published widely on Syrian politics and refugee issues.