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Pleasant Dreams

A One-Man Performance by Robin Hirsch

Yom Ha Shoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day
Commemoration
Sunday, April 19, 2009
8:00 p.m.
Mead Memorial Chapel

Robin Hirsch is a writer and performer, and the owner of the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village where he produces some 700 shows a year. In 1996, a year after the publication of his Holocaust-related memoir, Last Dance at The Hotel Kempinski, he was visited in his cafe by the director of the Berlin Jewish Festival, who invited him to perform. Pleasant Dreams traces the complicated journey which this visit set in motion, a journey back through the grave, through many graves, to the city where his family first saw life. It is one of the stories in his current memoir-in-progress, The Whole World Passes Through - what happens to a wandering Jew when he finally stands still and opens the door? The door may open, all sorts of celebrities and civilians may pass through, but the shadow of a larger history still looms.

Robin Hirsch was born in London during the Blitz to German Jews who had fled Hitler. He is a former Oxford, Fulbright and English-Speaking Union Scholar who has acted, directed, taught and published on both sides of the Atlantic.