Millie Werber

Eve Keller

Documents the co-author's survival story as a Jewish-Polish youth who faced death multiple times as an armament factor slave laborer and Auschwitz survivor, tracing her brief and beautiful marriage to a first husband who did not survive the war.

A Story of Love and War

Two Rings

At the heart of this wrenching memoir of a teenage girl’s wartime survival is something utterly unexpected: a love story that blazes briefly in a dark corner of occupied Poland. Judged only as a World War II survivor’s chronicle, Millie Werber’s story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto in the summer of 1942, at the age of 14, as a slave labourer in an armaments factory. Millie was transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed, she was certain that she would not survive. But she did. Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl that Millie had been during the war. Most importantly, Millie revealed her most precious private memory — that of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was, if not the love of her life, her first great unconditional passion. He died, leaving Millie with a single photograph taken on their wedding day, and two rings of gold that affirm the presence of a great passion in the bleakest imaginable time.

a story of love and war

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns. Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, from learned anatomies and works of observational embryology to popular books of physic and commercial midwifery manuals, Keller looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds. When wombs are described as "free" but nonetheless "bridled" to the bone; when sperm, first seen in the seventeenth century by the aid of the microscope, are imagined as minute "adventurers" seeking a safe spot to be "nursed": and when for the first time embryos are described as "freeborn," fully "independent" from the females who bear them, the rhetorical formulations of generating bodies seem clearly to implicate ideas about the gendered self. Keller shows how, in an age marked by social, intellectual, and political upheaval, early modern English medicine inscribes in the flesh and functioning of its generating bodies the manifold questions about gender, politics, and philosophy that together give rise to the modern Western liberal self - a historically constrained (and, Keller argues, a historically aberrant) notion of the self as individuated and autonomous, fully rational and thoroughly male. An engagingly written and interdisciplinary work that forges a critical nexus among medical history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves will interest scholars in early modern literary studies, feminist and cultural studies of the body and subjectivity, and the history of women's healthcare and reproductive rights.

The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves

Kimberly Anne Coles

All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the body’s transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And they show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape.

Eve Keller

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