Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MFA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Maurice Glenn Taylor

Committee Co-Chair

Mary Ann Samyn

Committee Member

Mark Brazaitis

Abstract

The novel, Jiří’s Ghosts, follows the life of the main character, Jiří/George Kohn, first in occupied Europe during WWII and then in America where he emigrates in 1943. Throughout his life, Jiří is plagued with the burden of having survived deportation to first Theresienstadt then Bergen Belsen concentration camps. In America, he becomes a professor, marries, has three children and lives a life plagued by ghosts from his past. They infiltrate his adult life and filter into his American family’s future.

Unbeknownst to most of his American family, Jiří has a second family in Czechoslovakia with whom he lost touch when he was deported. Seventeen years later, he reconnects with them and reforms an attachment with his first love Elena and their daughter Hannah.

Moving backwards and forwards between the past, present, and future, Jiří’s Ghosts interrogates how history haunts survivors of catastrophic events through loss, mental illness, and societal and familial trauma. It suggests the epigenetic implications and residue an event like a Holocaust leaves on a single life and the progeny, who inherit the weight of the ghosts and all that they imply about humanity and history. Moreover, it suggests how society is forever harmed by human’s willingness to perpetrate crimes against one another.

Written in four sections with chapters tackling different elements of dispossession and the characters who become part of that landscape, Jiří’s Ghosts begins and ends in the Czech Republic. Chapter stories are layered in between relating an entire life in the aftermath of WWI.

Embargo Reason

Permanent Embargo – MFA Creative Writing

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