Reframing Holocaust Testimony by Noah Shenker (review)

In this important book, Shenker seeks to cultivate what he calls "testimonial literacy" among those curating and researching interviews with Holocaust survivors. Exploring three large-scale collections—the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Oral History Collection, and the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History Archive—Shenker signals the need to consider "the mutual labor involved in testimony." As he notes, "institutional practices," from the training of interviewers to decisions about filming and subsequent dissemination practices, "constitute voices of testimonial co-authorship that act in conversation with those of interviewers and witnesses."

Adopting a broadly chronological approach, Shenker starts with the Fortunoff Archive whose roots lay in "grassroots" initiatives taken in the late 1970s. As Shenker demonstrates, the involvement of Laurence Langer in the project from 1984 was critical in shaping practice that rejected linear interviewing or placing time limits on the length of an interview, flagged a range of "inappropriate questions" that were seen as judgmental, and emphasized the agency of the interviewee over the interviewer. As project director Geoffrey Hartman explained, "we do not try to make historians of the survivors. We listen to them, try to free their memories," and in particular the kind of "deep memory" so prized by Langer.

Although the USHMM originally worked closely with the Fortunoff Archive, divisions emerged over questions of access. More importantly, USHMM's creating of the Permanent Exhibition drove a different collecting policy that, while it initially drew on the open-ended approach of the Fortunoff Archive, became more concerned with covering the key narrative anchors of the Permanent Exhibition and generating what Martin Smith dubbed "little nuggets" and therefore adopted a list of "core questions." While Shenker points to the importance of Langer in shaping Fortunoff, he fails to explore the role that Joan Ringelheim played at USHMM. Her interviews ran to eight or more hours, and she asked a whole new set of questions reflecting her interests in gender and the Holocaust, rather than ideas of deep and common memory that Shenker tends to privilege over historiographical concerns.

Shenker's overarching binary of deep and common memory finds its greatest contrast when he compares the Fortunoff Archive with the Shoah Foundation, which collected 52,000 oral history interviews between 1994 and 2005. Driven by concerns with indexing, the project adopted a common linear approach that invited interviewees to tell their life story in chronological order, giving roughly 20 percent of the interview to pre-war life, 6o percent to wartime experiences, and 20 percent to the post-war period. In marked contrast to concerns about eliciting deep memory shown by the Fortunoff Archive, the concern of the Shoah Foundation was to generate "responses that fit into the record of common memory—information to be indexed into a larger testimonial catalogue."

Rather than attempting the impossible as he approached these three archives—i.e., watching the more than 60,000 testimonies gathered by them—Shenker adopted a more selective methodology. He prioritized those interviews seen by the archives themselves as "exemplary," those most frequently disseminated or remediated by the institution, as well as a cross-cutting sample of fourteen individuals who were interviewed by all three institutions. This methodology does present some limits. While working with those interviews highlighted by the institutions themselves is worthwhile, and allows Shenker to flag key differences between archives as well as highlight the importance of not painting a picture of institutional hegemony, the book would have benefited from wider sampling across the collections.

Another gap emerges from Shenker's failure to consider why "only a relative handful of witnesses recorded interviews with all three archives." This is no doubt in part a story of chronology and geography. While the Fortunoff Archive was interviewing in the 1980s, the USHMM and USC only began interviewing in the 1990s. It is also a story of the relative reach of...