Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Henry Greenspan ,  Robert Coles
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Praeger Publishers Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 16.20cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 23.00cm
Weight:   0.552kg
ISBN:  

9780275957186

ISBN 10:   0275957187
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   30 September 1998
Recommended Age:   From 7 to 17 years
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

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

Reviews

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

Greenspan acknowledges that silence is part of the recounting....Greenspan reminds us that there are some things that words, even a flood of words, simply cannot convey. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors offers several other valuable insights....The explanations offered by scholars such as Greenspan, Roseman, and Tec shed light on the roots of inaccuracies and discrepancies in Holocause accounts. Diaries, testimonies, and memoirs about the Holocaust should not be put on a pedestal or treated as sacred. They need to be approached with an understanding of their fundamental strengths and weaknesses....When we read firsthand accounts about the experiences of Jews in the Holocaust, we are invloved not only in a learning process, but in commemoration. -Studies In Contemporary Jewry An Annual XVIII Greenspan has raised sympathetic listening to its highest level. The result is a truly important book both powerful and compelling. -Booklist Greenspan uncovers the internal tensions that have driven the survivors' searches for their own meaning in their posttraumatic world. All levels. -Choice This book presents some very interesting insights into how Holocaust survivors narrate their experiences.... By the end of the book, the reader has a good grasp of the variety of forms of recollecting. This is a good read. -Dimensions 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 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 ?Greenspan has raised sympathetic listening to its highest level. The result is a truly important book both powerful and compelling.?-Booklist ?Greenspan uncovers the internal tensions that have driven the survivors' searches for their own meaning in their posttraumatic world. All levels.?-Choice ?This book presents some very interesting insights into how Holocaust survivors narrate their experiences.... By the end of the book, the reader has a good grasp of the variety of forms of recollecting. This is a good read.?-Dimensions ?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 ?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 ?Greenspan acknowledges that silence is part of the recounting....Greenspan reminds us that there are some things that words, even a flood of words, simply cannot convey. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors offers several other valuable insights....The explanations offered by scholars such as Greenspan, Roseman, and Tec shed light on the roots of inaccuracies and discrepancies in Holocause accounts. Diaries, testimonies, and memoirs about the Holocaust should not be put on a pedestal or treated as sacred. They need to be approached with an understanding of their fundamental strengths and weaknesses....When we read firsthand accounts about the experiences of Jews in the Holocaust, we are invloved not only in a learning process, but in commemoration.?-Studies In Contemporary Jewry An Annual XVIII Unique and remarkably compelling....a psychological document of enormous significance. -From the Foreword by Robert Coles [A]n unforgettable book--poetic, pioneering, and instructive throughout--a virtual thesaurus on how to listen to survivors and how to understand what they say. -Henry Krystal Professor of Psychiatry, Michigan State University 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 [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 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

Author Information

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.

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