On experience, memory, and knowing: A post-Holocaust (auto) biography

Curriculum Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 425-442

  Neumann, Anna ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644752325     PISSN: 03626784     EISSN: 1467873X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0362-6784.00101     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. This article was originally presented at a symposium entitled "Background to Foreground: Higher Education, Scholarship, and the Jewish Experience," at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Minneapolis, October-November, 1992. I am deeply grateful to Aaron Pallas for introducing me to sociological perspectives on the life course and for reading and commenting, with much wisdom and understanding, on countless drafts; to Estela Bensimon for helping me find a medium to tell this story; to Diane Holt-Reynolds for sharpening my thoughts about the limits of empathic knowing; and to Steven Weiland for organizing the symposium that gave this paper the time and place to be. This story, focused on my father's place in my life and my work, leaves out my mother whose own story of survival in the Holocaust - and far beyond it - I cannot tell, but who, in many ways, made my father's telling, and my own, possible. I am most indebted to her.
2. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 158.
3. See, e.g., Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974);
4. Tamara Hareven, ed., Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978);
5. Dennis P. Hogan, Transitions and Social Change (New York: Academic Press, 1978);
6. and David L. Featherman and Annemette Sorensen, "Societal Transformation in Norway and Change in the Life Course Transition to Adulthood," Acta Sociologica, 26(2): 15-26.
7. For specific examples of autobiographical perspectives on the role of history in shaping intellectual life, see Bennett M. Berger, ed., Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990);
8. and Matilda White Riley, ed., Sociological Lives (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988).
9. Susan Krieger, Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
10. Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations, ed. Helmut R. Wagner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 170.
11. Krieger, Social Science and the Self, 53.
12. Drawing from extensive oral histories in the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer, in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) describes the double existence of Holocaust survivors.
13. Excerpt from a survivor's oral testimony, in Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 53.
14. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 8.
15. Langer refers here to Charlotte Delbo's La memoire et les jours (Paris: Berg International, 1985).
16. Langer's comments parallel those of Sander Gilman, who provides an extensive explanation of the language of the Nazi concentration camps in Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
17. See esp. Chapter 13, "To Quote Primo Levi: 'If You Don't Speak Yiddish, You're Not a Jew,'" 293-316.
18. David Rosenberg, ed., Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal (New York: Times Book of Random House, 1989).
19. Cited by Gilman, in "The Report of the Death of My Culture Is Overstated: An Analysis of an Interview with I. B. Singer," in Inscribing the Other, 281.
20. I am indebted to Art Spiegelman who, in his creations, has made this point particularly clear - that the tale of the father and the tale of the father's telling (and the son's coming to know) are integral to understanding intergenerational transmissions of experience. See Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1986),
21. and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale, And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
22. Clinical treatments of the topic are presented in Randolph L. Braham, ed., The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of Its Aftermath (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1988);
23. Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990);
24. and Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992).
25. For an ethnographic interpretation of differences between stories in the field (the subject's viewpoint and experience) and stories of the field (the researcher's story of her/his research experience), see John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
26. See, e.g., my edited volume with Penelope L. Peterson, Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). My studies of intellectual identity development among newly tenured faculty and of doctoral students' learning of research, both initiated over the past few years, also reflect this theme.
27. I wote about this learning in "Ways without Words: Learning from Silence and Story in Post-Holocaust Lives," as a chapter in Learning from Our Lives.
28. Michael L. Roth, "Shoah as Shivah," in Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds., People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), quoted from 409-414. In this chapter Roth casts Claude Lanzmann's film of Holocaust testimonials, Shoah, as a representation of shivah.