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Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory Paperback – January 27, 1993
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This important an original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.
Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting extensively from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the “indomitable human spirit” is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the perplexing task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the sprit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these haunting Holocaust testimonies.
- Print length216 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherYale University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 27, 1993
- Dimensions8.22 x 5.41 x 0.69 inches
- ISBN-100300052472
- ISBN-13978-0300052473
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- Publisher : Yale University Press; Reissue edition (January 27, 1993)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 216 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0300052472
- ISBN-13 : 978-0300052473
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.22 x 5.41 x 0.69 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #305,229 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,758 in World War II History (Books)
- #14,157 in Social Sciences (Books)
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2024Thorough writing with Haunting factuals.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2012Although difficult to read, as the author is very skilled in verbal communication, this book is a great benefit for me as a therapist. It is instructing me as to the impossibly difficult path that those who are abused and tortured continually over time have when they must live in a now "normal" world. I will need to read it several times. Thank you, Mr. Langer
- Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019There is a reference to this book in "The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma." I'm reading that book with the hope of making sense of a lifetime of dissociation overlaying terror I begin to appreciate as the product of complex trauma experienced from my earliest years. I would never suggest that what one little boy experienced compares with the horror of the Holocaust, but the exploration of memory in this book is remarkably comforting as I reflect on the struggle to simply be a human being when the underlying experience is terror, that I am unworthy, my caretaker untrustworthy and the world unsafe. There are no words for a one and two month old child to understand what is happening. Only the terror remains.
Interestingly, although I'm not Jewish, I've been a student of Judaism since I discovered while spending time in a quiet room at University that it was a library of Jewish studies. That launched me into an exploration of history and literature of the Jewish people, including study of World War II. Little did I expect then what i would later uncover about myself AND what I'd learn from Holocaust survivors in this deeply disturbing but surprisingly comforting book. All one can do is live life as best we can while carrying the unspeakable memories of what is blessedly in the past... even though it is not in the past.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2020This is a book that everyone should read. It gutted me. It temporarily destroyed what I thought of the world. It taught me just how situational morals and ethics are in an environment not previously conceived. But it also showed me the endurance of the human spirit. It showed me how when but one drop of water is available to a group of dying people, they each wish the others to have it to survive. It enraged me. Ravaged me. Broke me. And showed me how to be kind to others in ways I'd never before contemplated. It made me understand that we never know the horrors that others have seen and to always show compassion first. I read this book for the first time almost 30 years ago and I've never let its lessons stray from my heart and mind.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2001Lawrence Langer's landmark study of the oral and videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors is essential reading for anyone interested in Holocaust and Genocide studies. I found the book most interesting-- and most troubling-- for the way Langer describes the narratives which the survivors use to describe experiences that are, literally, beyond any kind of known literary conventions. Langer suggests that the traumas of these events are so shattering that the survivors still are struggling for ways to evoke their experience, to bear witness in a way that other people can understand. At the same time, their narratives are part of a struggle to make these incomprehensible experiences bearable. The efforts of suriviors to articulate their experience is not only meant to provide a historical record of a terrible moment in history, but also to give the surivors themselves a way of framing their experiences so they can live with them.
What is most wrenching about these testimonies, is, perhaps, the sense that these experiences will never be fully evoked. The stories which the survivors tell are just that-- narrative structures designed to impose a certain comprehensibility to experiences which are beyond understanding.
There are any number of incredibly moving, visceral works on the Holocaust, but The Ruins of Memory stands alone as a unique, and terrible study of how, on an individual level, the Holocaust shatters the self. It is hard reading, but it is also essential reading.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2002Lawrence Langer is well known for his cataloguing and interpretations on the Holocaust, but it took quite a few pages of this book for me to really "get" what he was saying. (I believe the first negative reviewer never "got" it. It's a difficult abstract concept, I fully admit that.)
Given that knowledge, and warned that you must enter the book without a preconceived negative notion about a split type of self, this book becomes fascinating. The details are quite dramatic, and it becomes progressively easier to see the point of the self splitting in order to survive the realities that simply can't be absorbed by the human mind. Fascinating work, and a book you won't want to put down.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2000I have read many many books of the holocoust many of them have been very moving but this book is excelent , to be honest i couldn't stop reading it, if you are interesting in this kind of books this is the one that you should buy, even do is amazingly sad, is absolutely and 100 % realistic. When i finish it i felt so weird, I actually felt like a was there,in that time,with those people,with those families and finaly into their community. as a secret between you and me,I could't stop crying to. with the other books that I have read before I kind of have an idea of what was living in that time but this one made me completely understand their pain and sufferings, is realy cruel what those people did to their community. so to be short I highly recommend this tittle, and i hope you enjoy it as much as i did.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2019While thoughtfully written from an individual with a very concise understanding of the English language, I had higher hopes for more personal accounts and actual testimonies. The author breaks between each recount of survivors to provide I depth analysis; however, I personally found it to be rather annoying. The stories told by the survivors give readers the same inclinations as those detailed by the author, which makes them seem unnecessary. The detail given to each individual story is amazing and the care put into the book is evident.
Top reviews from other countries
- SpencerReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
All fine.
- melReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
great thank you