On Listening to Holocaust Survivors

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors PDF Author: Henry Greenspan
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached—not as one-time testimony—but as an ongoing, deepening conversation. Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now—burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is not a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be made a story. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and—just as important—the ways they are not able to do so.

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors PDF Author: Henry Greenspan
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached—not as one-time testimony—but as an ongoing, deepening conversation. Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now—burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is not a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be made a story. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and—just as important—the ways they are not able to do so.

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony PDF Author: Henry Greenspan
Publisher: Paragon House Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Challenges conventional wisdom and wisely transforms the process of discerning and responding to what survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides have to say.

Witnessing Witnessing

Witnessing Witnessing PDF Author: Thomas Trezise
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823264041
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.

Reflections

Reflections PDF Author: Agi Rubin
Publisher: Paragon House Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Reflections is a book of memories, but it is equally a book about memory. Speaking of herself as well as other Holocaust survivors, Agi Rubin notes: We survivors are a bundle of contradictions. We push away the past, and we are constantly drawn back to it. When we are here, we are also there. And when we are there, we are also here. "Survivors,"; Agi tells us, "are jugglers. Life goes on, death goes on, and survivors themselves go on-somewhere in between." What is it like to live within such contradictions? While most survivor memoirs end at liberation, Reflections follows the fate of Holocaust memories over the course of an entire life. Agi describes in detail her initial awakening and the journey home, being a young survivor in the giddy limbo of postwar, recreating lives and families in the United States, responding to the unanticipated surge of interest in the Holocaust in recent years. Throughout, the inner dialogue with memory deepens. "New experiences reflect old ones" says Agi. "They put them in a different light, or a different darkness." These reflections are the story this book tells about Auschwitz, memory, and a life recreated.

Holocaust Testimonies

Holocaust Testimonies PDF Author: Lawrence L. Langer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300173710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Annotation This important and original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. Langer argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence.

Surviving the Angel of Death

Surviving the Angel of Death PDF Author: Eva Kor
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
ISBN: 1933718579
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Describes the life of Eva Mozes and her twin sister Miriam as they were interred at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, where Dr. Josef Mengele performed sadistic medical experiments on them until their release.

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors PDF Author: Henry Greenspan
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0275957187
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached—not as one-time testimony—but as an ongoing, deepening conversation. Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now—burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is not a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be made a story. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and—just as important—the ways they are not able to do so.

Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Beyond Testimony and Trauma PDF Author: Steven C. High
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
ISBN: 9780774828925
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts. The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as a thought-provoking afterword. They all demonstrate that - through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design - it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of "testimony" to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.

The Montreal Shtetl

The Montreal Shtetl PDF Author: Zelda Abramson
Publisher: Between the Lines
ISBN: 1771134054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. While this story is comforting, a closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. The arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was palpable in the streets of Montreal and their impact on the existing Jewish community is well-recognized. But what do we really know about how survivors’ experienced their new community? Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal, where they encountered difficulties with work, language, culture, health care, and a Jewish community that was not always welcoming to survivors. By reflecting on how institutional supports, gender, and community relationships shaped the survivors’ settlement experiences, Abramson and Lynch show the relevance of these stories to current state policies on refugee immigration.

The Listener

The Listener PDF Author: Irene Oore
Publisher: Regina Collection
ISBN: 9780889776531
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
A reflection on how trauma is passed from generation to generation.