Boy Number 84 – new text on Public Seminar

Slavenka Drakulić contributed to the latest forum of Public Seminar (Ocober 15th). Her text Boy Number 84 can be read here or opened as a PDF.

Public Seminar is a forum dedicated to informing debate about the pressing issues of our times and creating a global intellectual commons. An independent project of The New School Publishing Initiative, Public Seminar is produced by New School faculty, students and staff, and supported by colleagues and collaborators around the globe.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Photo: Public seminar

This new forum engages authors and artists—from very different places and writing in very different genres—in an ongoing conversation on “the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life” (title stolen from Nietzsche). The idea initially arose in response to the American administration’s southern border policy of taking children away from their parents: might this not be a moment to revisit testimonies by Holocaust survivors describing parent-child separation? The result of that revisiting is a short documentary film, The Last Time I Saw Them, which serves as a point of departure.