American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations by Lisa A. Costello (review)

Lisa Costello considers what and how society remembers about the Holocaust as we move further into a post-survivor era. As a rhetorician, Costello looks to fill a gap in scholarship that examines "how gender is performed in public memory processes to reengage, shift, or 'queer' audience orientations" (2). To this end, each chapter in this volume examines a "public memory artifact" (13). Public memory includes embodied knowledge, texts, videos, films, and museums "that perform memory, subvert binary gender constructions, and reorient audiences to connect" with the memory in question (7). Costello is especially interested in public memory created and shared by survivors and their families. This important monograph encourages readers to consider the relationship between gender, performance, and rhetoric in previously unexplored ways.

The introduction is centered in the field of linguistics, and, at times, is steeped in theoretical language that may present challenges to readers in other disciplines. Chapters are connected through rhetorical concepts, most notably the idea of kairos, "a force of time that is sometimes in opposition to chronos (as chronological time) because it exerts pressure at unexpected moments" (7). Kairos, Costello explains, "is catalyzed by the movements between 'discursive moment(s)' (such as the discursive moment that a film is released and discussed), when a rhetor addresses the reader or listener" (7). In simple terms, kairos is an interaction between the creator and the listener, viewer, or reader, intended to jolt the ones taking in the creation out of their present space and into a different one. These rhetorical concepts are deployed throughout the volume, but each chapter can stand alone and is framed both within the field of rhetoric and outside of it.

The first two chapters of the volume deal with film, including documentary, Hollywood movies, and recorded survivor testimony. In Chapter One, "Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Opening of Testimony Archives," and Chapter Two, "Schindler's List and its 'After-Affect,'" Costello carefully considers not only these two films, but also previously unexplored outtakes from Lanzmann's epic Hungarian film Son of Saul and recorded survivor testimony residing in the University of Southern California Shoah Oral History Archive. Costello asks if these visual representations of public memory will "remain simply chronos, a point on a timeline, or will it become kairos, that force that can open dialogic witness" (46). With this question, she suggests that they are powerful enough to engage the viewers in a rupture in time, that viewers will respond emotionally and consider how to take the film into their own lived experiences. In this way, embodied memory lives within more individuals.

Costello then shifts to written texts as forms of public memory and concentrates her argument around gender. Chapter Three examines two auto/biographies written by women. Ruth Kluger and Ruth Levy were survivors; Anne Levy is Ruth Levy's daughter. This chapter argues that women survivors delayed sharing their lived experiences because, historically, "women simply do not tell important stories – men do" (88). Costello does not summarize the texts written by these women but examines them, again, through the rhetorical lens of kairos. She argues that the authors wrote in response to the Holocaust, to bear witness, but, more urgently, to "warn humanity" (94). In this warning, that history was not inevitable and can repeat, Costello sees the written narrative as engaging readers across time and space.

Costello's strongest chapter examines two films by and about the descendants of Holocaust survivors: the 2012 Israeli documentary Numbered, and a short 2009 Australian video called Dancing in Auschwitz. Both films are controversial in different ways. Numbered documents Israeli teens who have tattooed their grandparents' numbers from Auschwitz on their own bodies. Dancing in Auschwitz is a music video, of sorts, where a Holocaust survivor and his descendants literally dance at Auschwitz and in other sites of terror to the disco song "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. Rather than a focus on an analysis...