Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (Helen Hooven Santmyer Prize Winner)

Vital reading for Holocaust scholars, students of modern Jewish life, sociologists, feminist theorists, and all readers seeking to understand their own relationship to the Holocaust.

Cutting across the boundaries of ethnography and autobiography to create a new kind of text, Making Stories, Making Selves offers a significant contribution to interpretive social science and the literature of the Holocaust. In it, feminist sociologist R. Ruth Linden begins with her own experience in an assimilated Jewish family, where Holocaust silence shaped her path. In 1983, she began interviewing Holocaust survivors, uncovering how personal narratives are continuously shaped and reshaped.

Through the intimate accounts she captures here, Linden reveals how storytelling constructs the self―not as a static truth, but as a living, evolving process. Her reflections challenge traditional social science, emphasizing the deep connection between researcher and subject. The result is a striking montage of voices, where interviewer and interviewee are inseparably linked.

This transformative study invites readers to reconsider the Holocaust not just historically, but personally. It offers a powerful contribution to interpretive social science and Holocaust literature, inspiring scholars and general readers alike to rethink survival, memory, and the stories we tell to understand who we are.

R. Ruth Linden is a health advocate, researcher, and academic. A cofounder of the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, she has taught at the University of California-San Francisco, Wesleyan University, Brandeis University, and elsewhere.