Holocaust Testimonies
ISBN: 9780300173710
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Holocaust Jewish (1939–1945) -- Personal narratives -- History and criticism; Holocaust survivors -- Psychology;

Hundreds of videotaped oral testimonies by Holocaust survivors are preserved in the Fortunoff Video Archives at Yale University. These tapes comprise a spontaneous record of victims' unimaginable ordeals, their disorientation, subsequent readjustment and the psychic scars they still carry. Intermingling their narratives with a structural analysis that draws on the writings of Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Viktor Frankl, Martin Gilbert and others, Langer ( The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination ) explores how survivors created an ``impromptu self,'' following impulses in order to stay alive. He notes that for many, the Nazi assault on body and spirit resulted in a permanent sense of discontinuity with normal assumptions about good and evil, individual choice and responsibility. This brilliant, scholarly book stares into the void; it eschews tributes to heroism and martyrdom, focusing instead on the personal and societal wreckage caused by mass murder. Jewish Book Club selection. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


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