LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

"What! Still Alive?!": Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming by Monika Rice (review)

the interviewer’s “assist[ance] in the search for answers as to why and how the extermination of European Jewry was possible [and] why it took so long for German society to… Click to show full abstract

the interviewer’s “assist[ance] in the search for answers as to why and how the extermination of European Jewry was possible [and] why it took so long for German society to admit and take responsibility for the crimes committed against the Soviet population” (p. 29). In other words, recognizing the positionality of oneself as the interviewer, and being “attentive to the thinking being who is coping with her or his life” (p. 34) constitute a productive relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee. Being attentive to “life”—and not just “survival”—is key to this principle. Walke considers it her ethical duty to let her interviewees narrate the entirety of their lives, their Soviet lives, and remember their childhoods, the war, and the postwar period, as they make sense of them in the post-Soviet world. Recognizing their “complex and often contradictory attempts ... to integrate ... is crucial to understanding the Jewish condition in the Soviet Union.” For this reason, the author chose to speak with pioneers and partisans who had not left the country after the war, and who attempted, in the words of Veena Das, to “occupy the space of devastation by making it one’s own, not through a gesture of escape but by occupying it in its present-ness” (p. 15). This method allows the author not only to point us to important historical insights about the Holocaust in Soviet Belorussia, but also to render, through her conversations in situ, the “destruction and its effects visible, [in] an attempt to ensure that destruction is not complete” (p. 27). Oral history thus becomes the ethical work of Holocaust memory and remembrance. Pioneers and Partisans is an excellent contribution to the history and memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, a book whose author has pondered thoughtfully the ethical and political implications of her scholarship. It addresses complex theoretical concerns without sacrificing narrative flow. That is a difficult task for any author, and Anika Walke has accomplished it beautifully.

Keywords: poland israel; still alive; author; alive jewish; survivors poland; jewish survivors

Journal Title: Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Year Published: 2019

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.