Synopses & Reviews
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≪/i> 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.
Review
Throughout this book...theory is encompassed by direct encounters, and these are conveyed with exceptional power and grace. The result is an incomparable work: No one has measured the depths of survivors' accounts more insightfully and discretely, with more scrupulous attention to detail, context, and implication, than Greenspan.Sidney Bolkosky Professor of History University of Michigan- Dearborn
Review
Henry Greenspan has broken ground with an approach to Holocaust listening so alive, so interactive, that it begs the rethinking of interviewing so far....His views, ultimately, are a synthesis of psychological, historical, sociological and theological outlooks that have come before, viewed in concert with a courage to defy convention while retaining an ever-abiding sympathy for victims.Jewish Book World
Review
An outstanding book--distinctive, gripping, moving in its testimony, and utterly lucid, honest, and timely in the analysis it provides. [Greenspan] shows us a great many things of immense importance.John K. Roth Pitzer Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
Review
Through his focus on listening to Holocaust survivors, Henry Greenspan has unravelled the tangled webs of misunderstanding and indentified the need to find terms of understanding that do not close off listening with a self-satisfying account of the suffering victim's assumed psychopathology- caveats that are important to the therapist-listener....This marvellous book should be read by all who wish to truly connect with patients whose experiences stretch the boundaries of conventional understanding.American Journal of Psychotherapy
Review
Unique and remarkably compelling....a psychological document of enormous significance.From the Foreword by Robert Coles
Review
[This book] takes us into a whole new conceptual realm of sympathetic listening. Greenspan moves us beyond the celebratory and psychiatric discourses that tend to govern the way we think and talk about survivors and enables us to hear them as if for the first time.Alvin Rosenfeld Director of Jewish Studies, Indiana University
Synopsis
Based on twenty years of the author's interviews and re-interviews with a group of Holocaust survivors--the first longitudinal study of Holocaust retelling--this landmark book describes how survivors recount their memories of the destruction. "It is not a story," insists one survivor of his memories. "It has to be made a story. In order to convey it." Guided by the author, readers directly follow the ways survivors can and--just as important-the ways they cannot "make stories" for the nightmarish "not-story" they remember.
Synopsis
Based on twenty years of interviews with the same core group of Holocaust survivors, this landmark book describes how survivors recount their memories of the destruction, offers striking new insights about the nature of testimony, the impact of listeners, and the experience of being a Holocaust survivor.
About the Author
HENRY GREENSPAN is a consulting psychologist and playwright at the University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
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