On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History - Hardcover

Greenspan, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0275957187 ISBN 13: 9780275957186

Publisher: Praeger, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

Greenspan, a psychologist, spent more than two decades interviewing and reinterviewing the same small group of Holocaust survivors, beginning in the late 1970s. In this book he restricts himself to seven people who were part of the initial study, four men and three women. Greenspan explains that they speak of a preoccupying pain, of fears for the future, and of losses of the past. They question God, society, or fate; some are more likely to question themselves. Those who are initially most outraged or assertive also speak eventually of self-doubt, terror, or despair. And those who first seem bound up by self-questioning, restraint, or grief also give voice to outward accusations or reveal thoughts of retaliation. In an insightful foreword, Robert Coles speaks of "trying to make sense of things, even to make sense of the senseless." Greenspan has raised sympathetic listening to its highest level. The result is a truly important book both powerful and compelling. George Cohen

Edition details

• Publisher: Praeger
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0275957187
• ISBN 13: 9780275957186
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224