LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES:
A Multicultural Life
Sophie Maj
Sophie Maj’s intense love for work, family and life emerge with clarity in her vivid and compelling narrative. We may rejoice in her insightful and courageous perspectives, and her contribution to the intellectual and political development of her adopted country. She is to be congratulated on her wonderful autobiography.
Patricia Grimshaw, Max Crawford Professor of History, University of Melbourne
Living in Interesting Times is a moving, honest and insightful memoir of a life touched by some of the most formative events of the twentieth century: by war, by the Holocaust, by displacement and migration.
Sophie Maj’s life has been truly multicultural. Born in Poland in the years before the Second World War, her Jewish family fled Poland for Russia as the German forces invaded in 1939. They escaped the Holocaust, unlike many of their relatives, surviving the war in Central Russia, Siberia, and Turkmenistan, and spending the immediate post-war years in Paris.
The family returned to socialist Poland in 1948, where Sophie studied aeronautical engineering and met her husband Marian. With Sophie’s parents and brother, they migrated to Australia in 1958.
Here, they discovered a very different life and society to that they had known in Europe. But among the quiet suburbs, conservative politics and often closed social circles of Melbourne, the Majs formed lasting friendships and successful careers – Sophie as one of the few women academics employed in the Engineering Department of the University of Melbourne.
Throughout, as her autobiography reveals, Sophie retained her strong political and social convictions.
Living in Interesting Times is a multifaceted memoir, offering the unique insights of one woman’s personal experience of some of the major events of modern history; a moving account of family life and family tragedies; commentary on the difficulties faced by working women in Australia and an on-going reflection on what it means to be an atheist Polish-Jewish-Australian.
For further information contact Sophie Maj
email: zofia.me@bigpond.net.au mobile: 0438 347 081
http://www.sophiemaj.com
Research Publications Pty Ltd
27A Boronia Road, Vermont VIC 3133
ph: 03 9873 1450
Price: $25.00