On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History

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Bloomsbury Academic, Sep 30, 1998 - Psychology - 224 pages

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.

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Contents

Tellable Beginnings
3
Survivors and Their Listeners
29
A Gathering of Voices
59
Copyright

6 other sections not shown

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On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History
Henry Greenspan
No preview available - 1998

Common terms and phrases

Adin Steinsaltz Aharon Appelfeld ahead analogies anymore Auschwitz become Bible Birkenau Bratslav Cain camp Charlotte Delbo context continue conversation dead death described destruction discussion dissolution dream Elie Wiesel everything evoke experience fact fate father feel ghetto gilgul happened Hasidic Hasidim hear hearable heard Holocaust survivors human terms images individual interview Jewish kind legacy Leon Leon's Lieberman listening to survivors living look Lydia Maimonides Manny meaning memories narrative Natalie never nightmare noted ongoing Operation Reinhard pain participants particular past Paula Primo Levi prosecution prosecutor question Raul Hilberg re-create recalled recounting reflected remains remember remnants retell retold Reuben role Rosenfeld rubbish salvaged screams sense silence skin folded sometimes speak storyteller struggle suggest survival Survival in Auschwitz survivor guilt talk tell tellable terror testimony things tion told Trauma Treblinka tree University Press unmasking victims Victor voice whole words York

References to this book

About the author (1998)

HENRY GREENSPAN is a consulting psychologist and playwright at the University of Michigan. He originally came to Michigan in 1977 as a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and at that time began his interviews with Holocaust survivors, and his teaching and writing about their recounting, at that time. His plays include Remnants, a celebrated work that also draws on more than 20 years of listening to survivors.

Bibliographic information

TitleOn Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History
AuthorHenry Greenspan
Editionillustrated
PublisherBloomsbury Academic, 1998
Original fromthe University of Michigan
DigitizedJun 11, 2008
ISBN0275957187, 9780275957186
Length224 pages
Subjects › 

Psychology / General
  
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