Author Benjamin Moore, winner of the 2022 Missouri History Book Award will discuss his book, The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in early 20th Century St. Louis, Tuesday, April 11, noon-1 p.m., at the State Historical Society of Missouri Center for Missouri Studies, 605 Elm St., Columbia. Moore’s talk is co-sponsored by SHSMO and University of Missouri Press. The program is part of the History on Elm series open to the public.
In 2004, Moore found 124 pages of tattered schoolwork from 1917 & 1918 by a nine-year-old boy named John Gergen in a south St. Louis dumpster. The boy, it turned out, was a Hungarian immigrant and an orphan, who was known over the course of his short life by at least seven names and whose life would be marked by failure and an early death. Intrigued, Moore embarked on a fifteen-year quest to find out: Who was John Gergen? And what did it mean to be an immigrant whose names and identities shifted according to time, place and circumstance?
Moore is Professor Emeritus at Fontbonne University in St. Louis where he taught English beginning in 1994. Moore’s interest in immigration includes his work with St. Louis’s Bosnian War refugees. In 2006, he founded the Bosnia Memory Project, now part of the Center for Bosnian Studies, to record the experiences of Bosnian genocide survivors and their families.