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

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.

From the Publisher:

"In On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, Henry Greenspan provides a brilliant analysis of the telling and retelling of survivor accounts, showing that it is very much an ongoing process. The book contains a wealth of insights essential to understanding the dimensions and impact of the Holocaust." --Jürgen Matthäus, Director of Applied Research, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

"This book should be mandatory reading for every oral historian. It is the premier example of sharing authority in the interview--a radical break from the approach of most 'testimony' projects."--Professor Steven High, Canada Research Chair in Public History, Concordia University

Praise for the first edition:
"Greenspan has raised sympathetic listening to its highest level. The result is a truly important book both powerful and compelling."--Booklist

"Henry Greenspan has broken ground with an approach to Holocaust listening so alive, so interactive, that it begs the rethinking of interviewing so far....His views, ultimately, are a synthesis of psychological, historical, sociological and theological outlooks that have come before, viewed in concert with a courage to defy convention while retaining an ever-abiding sympathy for victims."--Jewish Book World

"This marvelous book should be read by all who wish truly to connect with survivors of experiences that stretch the boundaries of conventional understanding."--Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"Unique and remarkably compelling.... We learn what it takes to study well and justly the lives of others--the time needed, the tact, the perseverance, the dedication, the consideration, the contemplation, and, not least, the moral energy."--Robert Coles, M.D., Pulitzer prize-winning author of Children of Crisis

"[This book] takes us into a whole new conceptual realm of sympathetic listening. Greenspan moves us beyond the celebratory and psychiatric discourses that tend to govern the way we think and talk about survivors and enables us to hear them as if for the first time."--Alvin Rosenfeld, Director of Jewish Studies, Indiana University

"[A]n unforgettable book--poetic, pioneering, and instructive throughout--a virtual thesaurus on how to listen to survivors and how to understand what they say."--Henry Krystal, Professor of Psychiatry, Michigan State University

"Throughout this book...theory is encompassed by direct encounters, and these are conveyed with exceptional power and grace. The result is an incomparable work: No one has measured the depths of survivors' accounts more insightfully and discretely, with more scrupulous attention to detail, context, and implication, than Greenspan."--Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History University of Michigan, Dearborn

About this edition

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