Read more
The importance of recording testimony of Holocaust survivors is well understood. While empowering the survivor and adding another layer of documentation about the cataclysm, it also serves as a bulwark against Holocaust denial. The same holds true for helping survivors pen their memoirs, or when writing their history. At the same time, this process also impacts upon the person recording the testimony, assisting the survivor in writing his or her memoirs, and certainly upon those who write about the survivors.
What happens when the interviewer, biographer, translator, or memoir transcriber is a child or grandchild of that survivor? This book is based on the premise that a collection of personal narratives of descendants of Holocaust survivors who interviewed their parents\grandparents, wrote their history, or helped them with their memoirs, narratives in which they describe and analyze the impact of these activities on their personal trajectories, can greatly contribute to our understand of the Holocaust and, particularly, its aftermath. Each of the book's 14 chapters is a personal narrative by a child or grandchild of Holocaust survivors who analyzes the impact that their interviewing, writing about, or writing with their surviving parents\ grandparents had upon their lives.
List of contents
IntroductionJudith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and David ClarkChapter 1"Buffalo Bill from Bochnia in Auschwitz": A Performative Memoir in Four Acts
Judith Tydor Baumel-SchwartzChapter 2Scraps and Souls
Anita GroszChapter 3Witness By Proxy
Jacqueline HellerChapter 4Mir Zennen Do: The Memory Motto of a Living Family
Ruchel Jarach-SzternChapter 5Passing the Baton: My Parents, Our Family Holocaust History, and Me
Naomi LevyChapter 6My Mother's Memoirs: A Joint Effort
Marian LiebemannChapter 7Homemade Testimony - Researching and Processing My Greek Parents' Holocaust Testimonies
Shmuel RefaelChapter 8Letters, Life, and Legacies - Writing the Story of My Mother, Karen Gershon
Naomi Anne ShmuelChapter 9Grateful Every Day
Ruth Finkel WadeChapter 10First, Second, Third Generation
Dov EichenwaldChapter 11Conversations With My Dead Grandfather
Madelaine Wolf Bukiet Chapter 12Remember and Not Forget? The Study of Jewish Law and Theater and the Holocaust
Yaniv Shimon GoldbergChapter 13Inherited Courage: A Third Generation Perspective on my Partisan Grandparents
Daniela Ozacky SternChapter 14Connecting the Dots: Talking to My Grandparents About the Holocaust
Gadi WinterChapter 15Epilogue
David Clark
About the author
Judith Tydor Baumel- Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Bar- Ilan University, Israel. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about the Holocaust and its aftermath.
David Clark completed his PhD on Jewish museums (London Metropolitan University). He co- edited, together with Maria Kousis and Tom Selwyn
, Contested Mediterranean Spaces (2011). He also co- edited with Sommaruga Howard
The Journey Home, Emerging out of the Shadow of the Past (2021).
