Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma

Notes

305 iNTRODUCTiON : REMEMbER WhAT AMALEK DiD TO YOU 1. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 10. 2. The law says: “The firstborn whom she [the widow] bears shall be established in the name of his dead brother, that his name be not wiped out from israel” (Deuteronomy 25:6–7). 3. Judith Tydor baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), ix. 4. ibid., xiii. 5. Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 3. See also 109–20. 6. Ringelheim, Joan. “The Split between Gender and the holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust , ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 344. See also 340–41. 7. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (St. Paul, MN: Paragon , 1993); Vera Laska, ed., Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Elizabeth R. baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); Sara R. horowitz, “Women in holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 364–77; Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Anna Reading, The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture, and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 8. Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, “introduction: The Role of Gender in the holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 14. 9. S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 14. 10. Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo was first published in 1947 by De Silva. in 1959 it was translated and distributed in English as Survival in Auschwitz, a title completely different from the original italian. Only in 1986 was the book published in English with the title If This Is a Man, which more exactly reflects the italian title. 11. Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (Turin, italy: Einaudi, 1963), translated as Family Sayings in 1967. NOTES 306 Notes to Pages 6–11 12. Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 120. 13. This connection between the intimate lingo of family’s daily life and identity is evident in the original italian title, Lessico famigliare, which means both “a family’s language” and “familiar language” or lingo. 14. Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xii. 15. For more on the Oyneg Shabes archive, see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (bloomington: indiana University Press, 2007); Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epsztein, eds., The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes—Ringelblum Archive: Catalog and Guide (bloomington: indiana University Press, 2009). 16. Emanuel Ringelblum, Kronika Getta Warszawskiego (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983), 394 (my translation). 17. hélène berr, Journal 1942–1944 (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2008). 18. ibid., 106 (my translation). 19. hélène berr, surviving witnesses tell us, was beaten to death on her bunk in a barrack in bergen-belsen one morning because she was too weak to move and get up for work. This happened five days before the british soldiers entered the camp and liberated it. i must thank Theodore Rosengarten for providing me with the details about the last moments of berr’s life. 20. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 15. 21. See Samuel D. Kassow, introduction to The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes—Ringelblum Archive : Catalog and Guide, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epstein, trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (bloomington: indiana University Press, 2009; xv–xxiv). 22. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 14. 23. in his powerful study of Ringelblum’s life, work, and personality, Kassow notes that by the summer of 1942 the indefatigable chronicler’s disjointed and fragmentary writing style of his daily journal entries “betray[s] Ringelblum’s anxiety and confusion as the world around him disintegrated, and as his comrades and friends...