Henry Greenspan

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors

Recounting and Life History

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This volume is based on interviews the author has conducted with the same core group of Holocaust survivors for more than two decades. Through these interviews, one can directly follow the ways recounting emerges and evolves, the way a story is made from a "non-story". Survivors' recounting is shown to be influenced both by the narrators' life histories before and after the Holocaust, and by the expectations of their listeners. As a result, their stories emerge within a double transaction: an inner dialogue between survivors' words and their memories, and an outer dialogue between survivors and their listeners.

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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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Praeger
• Seitenzahl: 222
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. September 1998
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 240mm x 161mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 502g
• ISBN-13: 9780275957186
• ISBN-10: 0275957187
• Artikelnr.: 21261993

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Foreword by Robert Coles Introduction Initiations The Forms of Recounting:
Tellable Beginnings The Context of Recounting: Survivors and Their
Listeners Voices, Stories, Enactments A Gathering of Voices The Stories of
the Prosecutor I The Stories of the Prosecutor II On Having a Story to Tell
On Listening to Survivors: Some Conclusions Bibliography Index