On Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory

The Holocaust narrative has been haunting Israeli cinema for many years. Initially, it was a repressed subject, hinted at only in the few official documentaries directed in the 1960s, but later it became more visible in the feature films directed during the late 1970s and the 1980s. At the time, Israeli cinema began to display a subjective approach to the issue, first with Orna Ben-Dor Niv's Due to that War (1989), which focused on the special relationship between two second-generation Israeli singers—Ya'ackov Gilad and Yehuda Poliker—whose popularity in the Israeli public sphere certainly assisted in offering a soft introduction to the painful subject and thus enabled a new approach to Holocaust documentaries. It was followed by a number of personal films, among them Tsipi Reibenbach's excellent documentary Choice and Destiny (1993) in which she dared to tell of the post-traumatic everyday life of her survivor parents in an extremely realistic manner, or even Moshe Zimmerman's documentary, Pizza in Auschwitz (2008). These documentaries composed a series of compelling testimonies about love and pain and the way they are interwoven in many Israelis' personal lives. But this was the story of the second generation, those doomed to serve as "commemoration candles," as Dina Wardi puts it.¹ Since then, a number of academic studies have been published on this cinematic issue, with the historical aspect often set aside if not overlooked.² Liat Steir-Livny's recent book, on the other hand, stems from a historiographical approach, and as such dares to address the unspoken issue of the third generation's documentaries. This generation was supposed to be freed of the previous generations' heavy burden. However, as Steir-Livny's research demonstrates, this is not the case. The increasing number of the third generation's accounts on the Holocaust reveals that time has not healed these wounds, allowing for an immense lacuna to be left open. The Making of Holocaust Memory attempts to fill the academic gap and provides a fascinating account on the subjective reminiscences of the traumatic experience that is the Jewish Holocaust.

Steir-Livny's bold decision to focus only on documentary has to be praised. In the past, Israeli cinema dealing with the Holocaust most often renounced the distinction between fiction and documentary, assuming that fiction is one possible reflection of the Israeli Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Bruzzi's contention that "a documentary is an illusion of an objective film."³ Since about 2010, there is a special interest in how various documentary filmmakers chose to document their personal memories: whether through the character of an imposter as in Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's Martin (1999) or an embellished past as in Mor Kaplansky's Café Nagler (2016), these films are inscribed with the traumatic intergenerational narrative that was never really spoken of and therefore had to be imagined.

Steir-Livny's book opens with a precise introduction to the characteristics and functions of documentary filmmaking. Relying on major documentary researchers such as Michael Renov, Bill Nichols, and Stella Bruzzi, Steir-Livny proposes a series of definitions that do not negate but complete each other. This results in a most relevant tool for evaluating the vast and comprehensive corpus presented in Steir-Livny's research.

The book is composed of five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, and it discusses a wide variety of Israeli documentary productions, all dealing with the issue of the third generation's possible narrations of Holocaust memories. The first chapter, "Depicting Women's Gendered Experiences in the Holocaust," deals with an aspect that was neglected in the past, due to the assumption that the Holocaust had the same influence on all Jews, men and women alike. Steir-Livny demonstrates that this was not so and provides a gendered chronological perspective on the representation of this issue, from the late 1990s to today (of particular interest is her analysis of Noa Maiman's Oy Mama [2010...