Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices by Jeffrey Shandler (review)

At this hinge moment in history, when those who witnessed the Holocaust are dying and print is ceding ground to digital forms of information collection, preservation, and dissemination, Jeffrey Shandler's Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practicesexamines innovative intersections between media and memory. By situating Holocaust testimony within the purview of the digital humanities, Shandler explores how relationships between text and image, lived experience and language, and corporeality and technology influence our understanding of the past.

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Agefocuses on the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA). The archive was created in the 1990s at the behest of Steven Spielberg. After speaking with survivors during the filming of Schindler's List, he felt that it was imperative to undertake a large-scale effort to collect Holocaust testimony. Notably, the VHA is now "the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust" (9).

To assess how the VHA has influenced the ways in which Holocaust testimony has been preserved, accessed, and interpreted, Shandler divides his book into four main chapters. The first examines the history of the VHA and contextualizes the archive's work. This macro perspective allows Shandler to explore pre- and post-Holocaust practices of "'salvage' ethnography," including the creation of an early twentieth-century Jewish folklore collection, wartime ghetto archives, and postwar memorial books ( yizker-bikher) (21). It also enables him to analyze twentieth- and twenty-first-century modes of Holocaust remembrance, contemporary "cultural memory practices," the effect of the internet on individual and collective modes of information management, and how a digital archive can function as a form of memorialization (30).

The following three chapters, which are presented as case studies that explore the themes of "narrative, language, and spectacle" respectively, take a more micro view (5). In the chapter on narrative, Shandler assesses how representations of the Holocaust to which interviewees had been exposed, as well as interviewees' experiences of recounting their wartime stories in different contexts, influenced the form and content of specific interviews. In the chapter on language, he focuses on the role of Yiddish in selected testimonies. And, in the chapter on spectacle, he explores the visual aspects of the collection's video recordings by discussing "survivors' display[s] of wartime injuries, prisoner tattoos, and religious artifacts" (6). In these case studies, Shandler also considers films, literary and artistic works, and related scholarship, thereby positioning the testimonies in the collection and his reading of those testimonies in a larger framework. His layered examination reveals the plurality of ways in which life stories can be recorded—linguistically, visually, corporeally, and digitally—and raises important overarching questions about how different media and technologies shape our individual and collective understanding of ourselves.

By structuring the book this way, Shandler engages with the enormity of the Holocaust while also bringing nuances of individual testimonies into focus: the way in which loss reverberates within generations of a family, how it is inscribed on the body, and how it becomes part of the narrative structure of a life. In the introduction, he states that he chose to address specific interviews "because they are in some way exceptional, and they offer insights into the larger subject at hand by virtue of their distinctions" (5), thereby allowing him to generatively read the archive "against the grain" and to see its contents from different angles (4). The details he selects from those interviews are some of the most striking and valuable aspects of the book; notable examples include images and descriptions of survivors' wartime injuries and some interviewees' descriptions of their emotional connections to "Christian religious objects" that figure prominently in their stories of survival (154). Shandler's discussion of these details evokes...