Lilian Furst

Lilian Furst, professor emerita of comparative literature at Chapel Hill, was another Jewish exile forced to leave her hometown. She wrote of her experiences inHome is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices, alternating her account with one written by her father. Born in Vienna, Furst was six years old when she watched a Nazi parade from her window. In 1938, her father came home with the news that Nazis were setting temples on fire and looting Jewish shops. Later they learned that the police intended to arrest them. She and her parents fled first to Belgium and then to England, where she earned her degrees and began publishing on European literature. She migrated to the United States in 1971 and began teaching at Chapel Hill in 1986.