Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (review)

162 SHOFAR even as they continually and complexly (I] turn back upon themselves. Proofreading errors abound in the notes as well. The hundreds of footnotes do contain numerous references to the scholarly literature. The reader plowing through all this material eventually may wonder why the articles and monographs are cited. Most of the explanation for all this work is left at the level of "On such-and-such a subject, see the learned article by so-and-so." We do not know in most cases why we would want to see the literature or whether some essays are more valuable than others or even, briefly at least, what they say. The book remains on the level of an academic travelogue throughout. There are surprisingly few references to some active scholars in the field of Midrash studies and little cognizance of larger issues in the field. We would like to know what the author thinks of the form analysis of Sifre in Neusner's studies. Does he agree with Neusner's sense of the basic propositions of the book about God and Israel and of the implied propositions of the compilation? According to Fraade, a major recurring theme in the work is the notion that the rabbis who wrote Sifre proposed that its words were Torah. Fraade's book thus says amazingly obvious things many times in a slipshod way. This makes it hard for us to judge the work an advance of significance in the domain of midrash scholarship. Despite these reservations there will be many occasional tourists who find this an enjoyable book. The bibliographiC work makes it well worth the investment as long as one takes care to double-check the information before making use of the references. Tzvee Zahavy Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies University of Minnesota Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, by Lawrence L. Langer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 216 pp. $25.00. In the last ten years, as the passing of time continues to reduce their numbers and silence their voices, many Holocaust survivors, including those lacking the ability or the desire to write memoirs, have consented to give videotaped interviews in which they recount their painful experiences. Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 163 The primary value of these interviews does not lie so much in their contribution to the factual record; rather, it is in the immediacywith which they immerse the viewer in the psychological and emotional realm of the survivor. Just as with written survivor accounts, the videotapes bring us into personal contact with the Holocaust and help us to experience it in ways that "objective" historical commentaries cannot. But even as written and oral testimony have much in common, it is clear that the videotapes reveal particular aspects of survival and raise some critical issues distinct from those at work in traditional written memoirs. Lawrence 1. Langer's Holocaust Testimonies is a serious and muchneeded discussion of the specific problems involved in interpreting videotaped survivor accounts and of the special opportunities that such interviews afford the viewer to enter the survivor's world. Langer, a professor of English at Simmons College, has written several influential books on Holocaust literature; one in particular, Versions of Suroival, focuses exclusively on the interpretation of survivor memoirs and the meaning of survivorship. In Holocaust Testimonies, he performs a similar type of analysis on about three hundred of the fourteen hundred videotaped interviews collected in the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Using the interviews as an empirical base, Langer seeks to prove that the survivor's self is inexorably disintegrated by the' conflicting memories of the Holocaust. "Common memory," as the author calls it, normalizes the camp experience in order that the survivor might cope with lingering trauma, and attempts "to mediate atrocity, to reassure us that in spite of the ordeal some human bonds [among the Victims] were inviolable" (p. 9). "Deep memory," in Langer's view, more faithfully represents the nature of atrocity because it "tries to recall the Auschwitz self as it was then" (p. 6). Though he states that both types of memory are inherent to the survivor experience and that each has...