Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony by Hannah Pollin-Galay (review)

This rich and insightful study provides an important contribution to scholarship exploring audiovisual Holocaust testimonies. Pollin-Galay draws attention to what she terms the "ecologies of witnessing," which encompass "ideology, poetic tendencies, ethos, mythology, material landscape, bodily practice, and the very mechanisms that allow people to organize and connect all these" (p. 2). These ecologies include the "social imaginary" at play in not only testimonies, but also the "spatial, aural, and material spheres that support the imagination" (p. 2).

The author's sharp focus on Lithuanian Jewry enables her to explore these testimonies in great depth. Pollin-Galay examines three groups of testimonies from Lithuanian survivors in Israel, North America, and contemporary Lithuania, delivered in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. In Englishlanguage testimonies, conducted mostly in the United States, the main mode of testimony she describes is that of the "personal-allegorical" (p. 5), or moments when individuals recreate personal experiences that serve an allegorical function by advancing more universal lessons for audiences. The largely Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies take on a more "communal-monumental" (p. 5) valence, in that witnesses speak of their entry into a larger, future-oriented civic, and communal setting. Finally, the testimonies of the Yiddish-language Lithuanian context encompass a "collectiveforensic" (p. 5) mode, in which witnesses convey stories that intertwine ethnic, geographic, and workplace cultures and rituals, while also providing witnesses an opportunity to accuse perpetrators and to vindicate those who helped Jews during the war.

Polin-Gallay's impressive source base includes not only a large number of previously recorded video testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, and the collections of Yad Vashem—most though not all conducted in studio settings—but also audio recordings of forty-six testimonies she recorded in Lithuania from 2004 to 2005. In her analysis of all of these sources, Pollin-Galay draws from the influential scholarship of Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, and others to explore definitions, conceptions, and practices of testimony. Her exploration, however, could have benefitted from addressing the foundational contributions that Lawrence Langer has made to the interpretation of Holocaust testimonies. While aspects of Langer's work have been subject to critique—including but not limited to issues of linguistic translation and the specificities of video testimony—his analysis has been instrumental to conceptualizing the tensions, memory work, and competing agendas that emerge in the process of giving and receiving testimony. Pollin-Galay's explorations of the generic conventions and interpersonal dynamics that help mold testimonies in large part emerge from the legacy of Langer's scholarship. She could have thus engaged his work to further underscore her distinct and insightful contributions to understanding testimonies in terms of space, language, and translation.

Chapter 4, "Accent as Archive: Yiddish and Language Biographies," constitutes one of her most innovative and unique contributions in this book. While earlier chapters address testimonies largely in terms of how "different ecological resources" (p. 157) impact how witnesses recall their pasts, this chapter looks more closely at the role of language and space as thematic elements of witnesses' stories. It brings to the fore the tones and accents of Yiddish and how that language "appears in … the form of a shadow or an echo, a tonal undercurrent whose meaning is not fully defined" (p. 157). The author's analysis of how witnesses speak and perform in Yiddish provides an inventive framework for how we can look at testimony more deeply through linguistic construction. Pollin-Galay convincingly demonstrates how Yiddish phrases can "work to break down the formality of the recording and can demonstrate social comradery between witness and interviewer" (p. 159). In other cases, the author insightfully shows how Yiddish accents can convey a strong sense of authenticity though not necessarily historical authority. Witnesses also enlist Yiddish in order to help them "misbehave" narratively, telling stories that do not support the overall thrust of the conventions and...