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FREE EVENT
Qesher Book Club: "Family Declassified"
Tuesday, June 18
USA 12:00 pm PT / 3:00 pm ET
UK 8:00 pm / France 9:00 pm / Israel 10:00 pm
The talk will last approximately 60 minutes
About this talk
Why do people keep deep secrets about their lives and ancestry? In Family Declassified, Katherine Fennelly applies her expertise as a social science researcher to answer this question regarding her maternal grandfather, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the US one hundred years ago.
A Google search for 'Francis Kalnay' yields more than 54,000 results—the vast majority related to the children's book, Chucaro: Wild Pony of the Pampa, for which he won a Newbery Honor in 1959.
Buried deep within the search results are a few references to his years at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. However, none describes how a foreign-born sailor overcame a childhood marked by tragedy and became the head of an elite espionage unit for the Allied Forces during World War II. At the OSS Kalnay was one of the few foreign-born Americans informed and 'indoctrinated' in what we now know as the ULTRA decrypts, the German Enigma messages that were used to capture or thwart almost all German offensive.
For more information about the book, see: https://www.katherinefennelly.com/about-the-book
About the Author
Trained as a social scientist, Katherine Fennelly is an immigration policy expert whose work has taken her to many of the countries where her late grandfather lived out his adventures. She has studied and worked in Iran, Spain, and Ecuador and done consulting work and academic residencies across Latin America and Europe. Katherine is a voracious reader and a life-long student of languages. She discovered her family's Jewish roots as an adult, something her Hungarian-American mother preferred not to discuss. When not tracking down classified documents and delving into family history, she volunteers for refugee service organizations, serves as a Spanish-English interpreter, and enjoys biking in Prospect Park and spending time with her daughters and granddaughters who live nearby in Brooklyn.
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