A Tribute to Miriam Fuchs: With Love from Her Student

First and foremost, Miriam Fuchs Z”L taught me about life narratives. She sat down at our seminar table with confidence, curiosity, and a sharp wit, listening to each of us and encouraging our explorations. I write this as one of many students spurred on by her intent gaze as she asked us to expand on our thoughts. Like a repeat customer, I took as many lifewriting seminars as I could from her in graduate school, and she patiently guided me through my coursework and exam preparation. She pressed me to reach just a bit further in my arguments, to develop my ideas, to flex, to attain a potential I could not see for myself. But I also read a fondness in her carefully crafted comprehensive exam question: the one she dreamed up thinking of me and the one response I wrote that made her proud. Good teachers mentor their students to become their future peers. Others experienced this too. I am not alone. Many of my classmates returned to her seminar table for my same reasons.

By their very nature, life narratives prompt intimate classroom conversations. As we analyzed the complexity of identity and referentiality encoded into the texts, the play of public and private itself could elicit experiential disclosure. But I never expected Miriam to offer her own lesson in scholarly humility and vulnerability. She detailed a potential professional mishap in her 1995 article “The Diary of Liliʻuokalani,” which she assigned as a companion reading to Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. Relying on the photocopied transcript of the diaries, she lost an important connection to the physicality of the diaries—their small size and the way Queen Liliʻuokalani’s handwriting fills each small page— which led her to reconsider old rumors from the Queen’s political enemies who questioned the Queen’s capability to author the diaries. Once Miriam viewed the original diaries, however, she recognized the disconnection, and her research resumed on its original trajectory. Her “cautionary tale” encouraged us to use primary sources, or at minimum, warned us to question mediated versions (39). As a librarian who works with mediated and accessible versions of texts, I found that her scholarly admission intersected with my own professional and research pursuits and impacted my approach to my job and to my studies from that moment on.

In 2012, Miriam offered a lifewriting seminar on Holocaust literature. The seminar considered issues in representing the Holocaust in a range of genres, from life writing to imaginative literature, in relation to Theodore Adorno’s proclamation that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). According to Philippe Lejeune, life narrative already has inherent impossibility, which Miriam focalized in her book The Text is Myself, but by reading inscribed life narratives and representations of the Holocaust, the class continuously contended with two impossibilities (6). I don’t believe my classmates and I—nor Miriam—were prepared to bear witness to the traumatic testimony of each text. With life narratives, the stakes are often high, but the extermination of six million Jewish people from all over Europe resulted in both genealogical and memory “holes” of indiscernible and unbearable size (Raczymow and Astro 104). With Miriam as our leader, we bore witness together. Job stress, fights with spouses, the burden of school work, a concerning diagnosis: any problem we brought with us to that seminar table seemed relationally small and distant compared to the immense pain and loss of lives. We also had moments of levity and release, and other times the relative smallness of our problems, as we sat at the table, refocused to life-size once we left the seminar room. Each of our lives had weight too. She gave so much of herself and her life energy to our class. We listened and watched and witnessed, and that experience is stitched into my memory of Miriam.

“My goal is that students leave the first class session questioning the expectations they came in with,” she wrote on her pedagogical approach to the teaching of life narratives (“Graduate Seminar...