Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors (review)

Peter Suedfeld's collection, Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors, allows seventeen eminent social scientists to trace autobiographically the connection between their early wartime experiences and their adult research careers, personalities, and values. Much has been published, both in oral histories and in autobiographical narratives, on the impact of the survival experience. There have even been a few attempts by scholars to connect their survival to the path of their academic careers—most notably, Raul Hilberg's The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (1996) and George L. Mosse's Confronting History: A Memoir (2000). Light from the Ashes, however, is the first collection explicitly to "explore how early trauma and adult career meshed with each other," as Suedfeld writes (p. viii).

Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, conceived the idea for this book after organizing a symposium at the 1996 annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology. He asked participants to "think about the paths of influence that led from childhood persecution and upheaval to the adult choice of profession and research focus, and to be prepared to discuss both their personal and professional autobiographies openly" (p. vii). The success of this symposium, revealed in the participants' insightful and moving introspections, led Suedfeld to pose the same task to contributors in this volume—in short, to use their social-scientific skills and tools to examine their own lives.

Such an intensely personal "life review" presents a difficult challenge for a group of late-middle-age social scientists who were trained (mostly before the rise of postmodernism and a wider appreciation for the role of narrative and subjectivity) to produce work that is objective, dispassionate, and distanced. So it should come as little surprise that at least a few prospective participants were reluctant to embrace this challenge.

Moreover, the essays vary in the degree to which they meet Suedfeld's challenge. To be sure, the vast majority of the essays constitute reflective and courageous attempts to connect the past with the present. A few of the essays, however, dwell more safely on the surface of intellectual autobiography rather than profound introspection. This diversity of responses reminds us that the long-term aftermath of horrendous persecution, and of integrating that experience into one's present, follows few uniform patterns. Survivors and refugees achieve integration at different ages and certainly in different degrees. As Suedfeld writes, "the differences reflect strong and real differences in how my colleagues and fellow child survivors face their past, present, and future" (p.431). In the final analysis most of the essayists meet this unique challenge in ways that are engagingly personal—made even more so by the inclusion of photographic portraits—and that transparently reveal the path to greater self-knowledge.

The book is divided into three major, but overlapping, categories of contributors: those who (1) lived in Nazi-ruled countries until they were liberated by the Allies, (2) had escaped from Nazi-dominated Europe before the annihilation of the Jews became an organized and official aim, or (3) came from non-Jewish German families who were targeted because the fathers were prominent opponents of National Socialism. While Suedfeld admits that the book has been prepared in this manner merely for the sake of order, one would expect that some clear links would emerge between these diverse early experiences and the later trajectory of the writers' professional lives. Any obvious long-term differences do not, however, manifest themselves in these essays.

In addition, the volume might benefit from a more deliberate connection with the voluminous survivor literature that exists. While the respondents' particularities are intriguing, a wide range of universalities regarding survival and coping strategies could weave together many of...