{"title":"Bad Testimony: Making and Breaking the Rules of Witnessing","authors":"Hannah Pollin-Galay","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"What is testimony? While most theorists have defined testimony based on deep truth structures, here the question is approached inductively, asking what kinds of speech the participants in each setting consider testimonial, and thus worth recording, and which they do not. In each ecology, participants rely on a different testimonial genre, a cluster of qualities and imaginative ideals, which helps them produce a recording together: 1) testimony in the English-language American context should be personal, in the way that the witness’s voice sounds and allegorical in its possible rhetorical outcome, 2) a communal witness voice, an “I” that incorporates political and national institutions, is more prominent among Hebrew-Israeli witnesses, and monumentality, the greatness or dignity of the narrator, is the ideal outcome of the process, 3) witnesses in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology tend to speak from an informal collective perspective, and point toward forensic accusation as the most ethical outcome of testifying. Since the power of these frameworks remains invisible when they are consensually applied, their presence becomes clearest, in fact, when participants run into conflict—in what we might call moments of “bad testimony.” The chapter also offers a brief genealogy of testimony taking in each of the three settings.","PeriodicalId":270029,"journal":{"name":"Ecologies of Witnessing","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121288811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Hannah Pollin-Galay","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The Conclusion coalesces the chapter themes—interviewing genre, family, enemies, language, and place—in relation to one another, and to the question of the Holocaust as catastrophe, as transvaluation. It ends by reflecting on the outcomes of the Era of the Witness as a translation project. While testimony takers may have sought to unite Jewish memories by traversing the globe with cameras and questionnaires in the 1990s, their efforts revealed valuable tensions between different loci of Jewish memory. We should therefore challenge attempts to universalize catastrophe narratives but also avoid facile accusations against the North American institutions that brought their testimonial visions abroad. When we examine Holocaust testimony recordings of the past 40 years, we discover the “Era of the Witness” to be much more of an encounter between different memory paradigms, rather than a hegemonic overthrow of one in place of another. This encounter has, even if by accident, created rich material for rethinking what catastrophe is made of, and how it looks and sounds in personal form. ","PeriodicalId":270029,"journal":{"name":"Ecologies of Witnessing","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116983274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Places and Non-Places","authors":"Hannah Pollin-Galay","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how witnesses animate places, both those reconstructed in narrative and those displayed on camera. Moreover, this chapter delves into the question of catastrophe as bodily perception. Memories of radical physical alienation, kinetic maneuvering, and topographical orientation all contribute to the witness’s notion of history. For witnesses testifying in Israeli and North American settings, their physical environments support different narratives of disembedding. Witnesses’ sense that something about themselves and the world has drastically changed can be affirmed by the physical scenery of today, which is, in fact, very different than the one within which they were born. Witnesses testifying in Yiddish in Lithuania have substantially different spatial guidelines when telling their stories. In this setting, progression in time is not matched by movement in space. The cities of Kovna, Vilna, and Shavl provide images of both prewar origin and postwar destination. Even dark places—ghettos and shootings pits—can intermingle with the geography of the everyday.","PeriodicalId":270029,"journal":{"name":"Ecologies of Witnessing","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121761551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Solidarity: Kin, Party, Neighborhood","authors":"Hannah Pollin-Galay","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how witnesses define social belonging before, during, and after the Holocaust. The most visible treatments of “the Holocaust family” in scholarship and popular culture build off of a psychotherapeutic vocabulary, which highlights parent-child relationships and the transmission of Holocaust trauma through intimate relationships. This approach is most illuminating when studying testimonies from the English-language American ecology, in which personal experience is the main building block of narrative. Revealing different base assumptions about solidarity, witnesses from the Yiddish-Lithuanian and Hebrew-Israeli ecologies place themselves and their kin on a continuum with larger social spheres. Conversations develop around two different variations of “the Jewish ‘body politic,’” a term from Dan Miron’s reading of 19th and 20th century Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In Yiddish testimonies, this collective protagonist appears fluid, informally defined. The family is part of a larger network that is termed the “eygene,” literally “one’s own.” Witnesses tend to incorporate an extensive cast of local characters into their testimonies and let the criteria of being an “eygene” shift with the circumstances of war.","PeriodicalId":270029,"journal":{"name":"Ecologies of Witnessing","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131343241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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