you can't loose the opportunity of reading this book | Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory |...

Should be included in any Holocaust library | Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory | Lawrence L. Langer

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	• Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory Lawrence L. Langer Yale University Press, 1993 - 235 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Vitally important text for Holocaust studies

Lawrence 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.

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you can't loose the opportunity of reading this book

I 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.

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Should be included in any Holocaust library

Lawrence 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.

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holocaust

this book really moved me in how no other book has. i now have an appreciation to those who suffered in the holocaust and to hope and prevent something like the holocaust to occur again

A sustained analysis of the ways in which oral testimonies of survivors contributes to the understanding of the Holocaust, this book also aims to shed 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, the author shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling one to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as one might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levy 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 "indominable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the spirit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these Holocaust testimonies.

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