#my imaginary niche grad seminar

[historicity-was-already-taken]

In the past I have been highly critical of the fact that so much Holocaust memory is constructed through the autobiographical/memoiric writings of men, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. And I remain critical, because that male canon obscures the experiences for women.

I've understood for a while that women write for their families while men write for history, but I've finally figured out how to put words to another piece of it. Because women perceive their individual experiences to have been unimportant, or as a tiny part of a whole, their writings are much harder for laypeople to understand.

One of the most moving Warsaw Ghetto resistance memoirs I've read so far has been I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady-Szwajger. Towards what I'm going to call the first ending of this memoir (pg. 153), she writes:

When I finished the last page of my memoirs, I went back to the beginning. I read them through-and suddenly realized that something was wrong. I had wanted to bear witness to the true events of those times, but I had done it very awkwardly. Over the last forty-five years, the world has changed, new generations have grown up, and everything that happened has faded in the mists of history ... Everything has changed - even the streets I wrote about are no longer on the map of contemporary Warsaw. So much of what I wrote has ceased to be clear and comprehensible ... We have crossed the barrier of shadows, and one by one we are leaving. The young are left behind. And it would be a good thing if something of those years remained for them. And so we need to explain, not just to reminisce. I don’t know whether I am able to. I am not a professional writer, or a chronicler. But I must try ...

This type of ambivalence towards one's right to record their memories over such a traumatic past is a typical presence in women's Holocaust memoirs, but so is the issue Blady-Szwajger so eloquently points out above: the memories recorded are niche, interpersonal; recording events and landscapes and individuals which have not penetrated collective memory, and remain obscure to laypersons. At the time, the massacre of a Ukrainian shtetl was the most memorable moment in a writer's life, but from the lens of us, as students of history, it may be a blip in the larger history of Einsatzgruppen actions at the beginnings of Operation Barbarossa.

Because male writers are much more likely to understand themselves as purveyors of history, and not simply as small, modest pieces of a collective, many of their writers include attempts to contextualize events they personally experienced within the larger history of World War II and the Holocaust. Whereas women, simply remember.

#historical methodology #holocaust diaries memoirs and autobiographies as primary sources #source analysis #methodology #holocaust history #my imaginary niche grad seminar #the seminar in my miiiiiind #the class which fills my braaaiiinnn #sorry those last two were miss saigon parody lyrics