October 8, 2020
Join us for a virtual conversation with author Catherine Grace Katz as she discussed her new book, The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans, A Story of Love and War. Katz will be in conversation with the Library’s programs and education manager, Martha Williams.
Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. In The Daughters of Yalta, Katz draws on newly accessible sources to bring to light the untold story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin seventy-five years ago, and of the fateful reverberations in the waning days of World War II.
Kathleen Harriman was a champion skier, war correspondent, and daughter of US ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman. Sarah Churchill, an actress turned RAF officer, was devoted to her brilliant father, who depended on her astute political mind. Roosevelt’s only daughter, Anna, chosen instead of her mother Eleanor to accompany the president to Yalta, arrived there as keeper of her father’s most damaging secrets. Situated in the political maelstrom that marked the transition to a post war world, The Daughters of Yalta is a remarkable story about complex personal relationships seen through the lens of a pivotal historic moment.
Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago. She holds degrees in history from Harvard and Cambridge and is currently pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.