Brazilian Novelist visits Southampton

The Parkes Institute jointly with Modern Languages welcomed Adriana Armony to Avenue Campus last week to give a seminar at Humanities. Dr Armony who teaches Brazilian and Portuguese Literature at the Centre for Jewish Studies, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, describes herself as a Brazilian-Jewish novelist and her talk was about Jewish Literature in Brazil, the country once named: "the land of the future", by Stefan Zweig.

Dr Armony discussed works by Brazilian-Jewish writers, and described her own experience as a contemporary Jewish writer in Brazil. The central character in Judith in the Future Land, her second novel, is Armony's own late Jewish Palestinian grandmother, Judith. The novel tells how in 1916, along with other Jews, Judith fled from Tzfad and travelled from Constantinople to Odessa through the Black Sea on board The Rusland only to have to flee Odessa after the Russian Revolution. The book has yet to be translated into English though non-Portuguese speaking members of the audience were provided with an extract, kindly translated by Dr Christine Lopes from the department of Philosophy.

The success of the seminar and the visit was celebrated later and there are plans under discussion which might see future collaboration between the Parkes Institute and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.