Kiss the Red Stairs: An Evening with Marsha Lederman

The Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Rady Jewish Community Centre are pleased to present “Kiss the Red Stairs: An Evening with Marsha Lederman” on Wednesday, October 12, 7pm, at the Berney Theatre, 123 Doncaster Street, as part of THIN AIR 2022, Winnipeg’s annual celebration of books. The evening will feature a reading from Lederman’s powerful memoir, Kiss the Red Stairs, followed by an on-stage conversation with Belle Jarniewski, Executive Director of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada.

Award-winning journalist Marsha Lederman was confronted by the horror of the Holocaust as a child when she asked why she had no grandparents. Decades later, reeling from a divorce and the loss of her parents, she delved into her parents’ Holocaust stories, piecing together their personal experiences, researching the history and aftermath of the Holocaust, and exploring the intergenerational trauma which impacts her own life. The result is her searing memoir, Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. With clarity, honesty, and empathy, Lederman takes us into the darkest places of trauma and loss, and illuminates the courage and resilience which are also her inheritance. As Tom Sanborn writes in a Vancouver Sun review of Kiss the Red Stairs: “Art can provide an element of witness on the killing fields of history and help redeem the human experience. This book does just that, and does it in shapely, well-crafted prose.”

Tickets for “Kiss the Red Stairs: An Evening with Marsha Lederman” are $12, available online through Eventbrite HERE, or at the door.

Born in Toronto and now based in Vancouver, Marsha Lederman is the Western Arts Correspondent for the Globe & Mail. Previously, she was a National Arts Reporter for the CBC.