“Beyond Individual Recall”: Holocaust Testimonies in the Age of Postmemory

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel addresses the proliferation of archives documenting Holocaust testimonies, exploring their past and present practices as well as their prospects for future use. This is particularly pressing given the dwindling numbers of Holocaust survivors and increasing scholarly and public debates concerning the transition from living memory to mediated, postmemory accounts of the Shoah. This proposal has been shaped by those debates, particularly in response to contentious albeit constructive issues that emerged during the 2013 AJS conference seminar on “Video Interviews of Holocaust Survivors: Intersecting Approaches.”

Archives such as the “In our Own Words Oral History Project” in the U.S., as will be discussed by Avi Patt, have addressed the fading of living memory by exploring how descendants of survivors might transmit cross-generational accounts of the Shoah. In her contribution, Anya Quilitzsch examines how the work of AHEYM has helped collect oral histories in Yiddish that help to salvage and restore Jewish life and rituals in the former Soviet Union. Lawrence Langer will present a paper on the Shoah Foundation by way of comparison with the Fortunoff Archive, examining how those repositories are sharply differentiated by their respective approaches to addressing the agency and historical backgrounds of witnesses. Finally, Noah Shenker will respond to each paper, commenting on how the preservation of Holocaust testimonies is an endeavor that involves not only an interpersonal encounter between witnesses and their interviewers, but also the particular institutional methodologies and cultures of the archives collecting the accounts.

Underlying this panel are the foundational insights of Charlotte Delbo, Saul Friedländer, and Lawrence Langer, and their notions of “deep” and “common” memory. Whereas deep memory overwhelms survivors by reintroducing them to the range of senses experienced during the Shoah and hindering any efforts to keep that past at bay, common memory is grounded in the contemporaneous moment of its telling and rendered in a stabilizing, coherent, and redemptive manner. Far from being discrete from one another, those two strains of memory are interrelated and often shaped by archives that are grappling with how to preserve memories of the Holocaust “beyond [the] individual recall” of living witnesses.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Chair

• Joanne Weiner Rudof, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• And You Shall Tell Your Children: Examining “Second Generation” Holocaust Testimony - Avinoam Patt, University of Hartford

• The Role of Holocaust Memory in Transcarpathian Jewish Life between 1945 and 1978 - Anya Quilitzsch, Indiana University

• Assessing Holocaust Testimonies - Lawrence L. Langer, Simmons College

Respondent

• Noah Shenker, Monash University