The Meaning of Stories Without Meaning: A Post-Holocaust Experiment (original) (raw)
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Thinking Against a "Master Narrative": Ongoing Traumas, Affective Arrests of Certainty and Calls for Response-ability in Selected Holocaust Literature Alison Pick's 2010 book, Far to Go, ends with a postscript that finishes with the following words, "The train has no answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes; it is moving very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives" (311, emphasis mine). These are the final words read in English 783, a graduate seminar at McMaster University that I had the pleasure of being involved in. Collectively, we worked through the difficult project of encountering, and bearing witness to, Holocaust texts and the histories, peoples and voices that are silenced by a violent eradication of their lives. A question that was often asked in the classroom is, "How does one end a trauma text?". When traumas are pervasive at the individual and collective levels, is it possible to write an end to a collective trauma of such horror and magnitude? Does the "train" ever arrive? Pick's final words do not signify an ending. Instead, they call for an embracing of ongoingness and a recognizing that the goal in thinking through issues is not a resolution-it never arrives.
The Wounded Healer: Finding Meaning in Suffering
2012
In modern history, no event has more profoundly symbolized suffering than the Holocaust. This novel "Husserlian-realist" phenomenological dissertation elucidates the meaning of existential trauma through an interdisciplinary and psychologically integrative vantage point. I use the testimony of a select group of Holocaust witnesses who committed suicide decades after that event as a lens to examine what their despair may reveal about an unprecedented existential, moral, and spiritual crisis of humanity that threatens to undermine our faith in human history and reality itself. By distinguishing what they actually saw about our condition from what they merely believed about reality, I show there is a reliable hope that can fulfill the highest reaches of human nature in the worst conditions. This I call a Psychotherapy of Hope. To this end, I provide a broad overview of the four main forces of psychotherapy to evaluate the role each plays in healing this crisis. I then provide an elucidation of empathic understanding within an "I/Thou" altruistic relationship having power to transform human personality. The primary barrier to personal transformation is shown to be no mere value-neutral indifference, but "cold" indifference or opposition to an objective good. No one can avoid a faith commitment, and the only solution to this crisis is our love or reliance on a self-transcendent good or benevolent super-ego worthy of our trust.
Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2015
This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holocaust to record the personal experiences of the author, Margit K. I examine the text in terms of the role of writing and narration in processing trauma and how these appear in the narrative. In her memoirs, Margit K. had imbued her personal history of persecution with meanings that facilitated their integration into her life history and her self-definition. She chose to narrate her tragic past using euphemistic, mitigating, or ironic language and constructed her stories to have positive outcomes while attempting to write as little of the pain and tragedy of her persecution as possible. The euphemizing narrative methods used in the memoirs disappear entirely in the diary and the themes discussed in the diary are also different, which shows the advantages of constructing a desired past within the genre of the memoirs in contrast to the more strictly defined genre of diary-writing.
God on the Gallows: Reading the Holocaust through Narratives of Redemption
God on the Gallows: Reading the Holocaust through Narratives of Redemption "Where is God now?" is a question from the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States. Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how religious narrative frames are used by participants to construct Jews and the Holocaust through their readings of Night, and more generally how students wield such narratives in their pursuit of meaning. Also informed by the work of Holocaust scholars, educational researchers studying shifting narrative identity, and those studying the nexus of civic pluralism and religious framing, I build a bridge from which to view the ways participants constructed meaning about the Holocaust and the implications for teacher candidates, teachers, and teacher educators. Given that Holocaust literature such as Night and Anne Frank: Dairy of a Young Girl are now canonical texts in English classes throughout the United States, and given that lessons of tolerance or civic pluralism are often expected to accompany the reading of this literature, throughout the paper I discuss the affordances and constraints of the narratives that students in this study used. I end by making recommendations for classroom practice.
Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony
This article examines how Holocaust survivors interpret the meaning of specific "iconic," all-absorbing memories that seldom find their way into the survivors' public account of their Holocaust experience. Utilizing the idea of public and private space, and personal and corporate pain as heuristic tools, I examine how survivors organize experience. In the final section, I argue that survivors live with countervailing pressures: the struggle to forget and remain silent and the need to tell and to memorialize. Oral testimony's communal, didactic, and therapeutic nature make it a unique platform for these conflicting forces to work themselves out by transforming narratives of suffering into narratives of witnessing.
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2004
According to the mourning rituals set forth by Jewish law and tradition, mourners are to create stress-free and comfortable environments--mekomot nekhamah--within which to mourn. Elie Wiesel's Night, Anne Frank's diary, Erica Fischer's Aimée and Jaguar, and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah serve as their respective writers' mekomot nekhamah, providing forums through which they express themselves comfortably and healthily. Using Anne Brener's psychotherapeutic exploration of Jewish mourning rituals, together with Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's analysis of the act of witnessing, I show that the Jewish mourning process relates to these very different forms of Holocaust survivor memoir--autobiography, diary, portrait, and documentary--as a way to read the literature, process it, and understand it. Components of Jewish mourning--such as khevrot, hesped, and yizkor--are also components of Holocaust survivor literature, found in aspects of audience, respect for both the dead and the living, and remembrance. Literary and filmic expressions of traumatic experiences, such as the four texts mentioned above, are no less expressions of grief than the kriah shivah, the traditional rent of clothes to signify deep mourning. Coupled with the indispensable act of witnessing, Holocaust survivor literature becomes gemilut khasadim, acts of kindness, on behalf of Holocaust victims who cannot mourn or remember for themselves.
Writing and rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the consequences of interpretation
1990
This paper is an attempt to explore the relation between poetry and survival taking as a point of focus the poetry of the post-war European poet Paul Celan. By drawing attention to the French thinker Jacques Derrida's several influential studies of Celan's poetry on the problems of "witnessing", "testimony" and the "idiomatic" this paper finally examines the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben's notion of the "remnant" to understand a poetics of survival.
Review Essay: The Problems of Storytelling: Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2000
At the best of times, the problems of storytelling-of how stories are told, of who gets to tell their story and to whom, of how storytellers are heard and interpreted, of why people tell and listen to stories-are difficult enough. The performative, social and cultural dimensions of storytelling and the political and moral powers of storytelling are fraught with complications of voice, authority, interpretation, meaning, action, etc. When the stories we are listening to or telling are stories of violence, disruption and destruction, these problems are only amplified and made more urgent. The case of stories that surround the Holocaust have been a key site of discussion where these broader questions of storytelling intersect with the unique narrative challenges of situations of violence and chaos. Though there was a long period of silence surrounding the events of the Holocaust when it was first made widely known, in the last 30 to 40 years, there has been a long engagement with the problems of "reading" the Holocaust. The debate has not been only academic. Beginning with the publication of diaries like the one Anne FRANK kept or of stories like those from Elie WIESEL, and continuing on into the present, wider attention has been and is being paid to the Holocaust. This hasn't made the problem of how to respond to these stories any easier, however. This is especially true for those who approach the traces of the Holocaust from ethnic and generational distances that make it even more difficult to know how to respond to these stories. [1]
Every Individual Should Feel As If”: Exilic Memory and Third Generation Holocaust Writing
The experience of the Holocaust has left an indelible mark upon the Jewish psyche. Initially, this trauma was expressed through eyewitness accounts, then the -second generation,‖ the children of survivors, wrote of their own traumas. The third generation writers, whose relationship with the Holocaust is more attenuated, continue to evoke the trauma of Holocaust in their texts. By engaging particular Jewish motifs, often modeled on constructions of -collective memory‖ and the imagery and language of the Haggadah,, young North American writers challenge conventional ideas about -the witness‖ and testimony in order to perpetuate the structure of collective memory by -witnessing through imagination.‖ Three literary works, Aryeh Lev-Stollman's The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, and Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases provide examples of this technique.