On listening to Holocaust survivors
Subtitle: recounting and life history
By: Henry Greenspan ; foreword by Robert Coles.
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Westport, Conn
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives -- History and criticism.; Holocaust survivors -- Interviews -- History and criticism.
Description: How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This 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, and sometimes fully consuming it.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-192) and index.