Overview

Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance explores interconnected testimonies of four Holocaust survivors who were members of the Akiva youth group in Cracow, Poland, who participated in the ghetto resistance. Drawing on literary and photographic discourse, Jelen extracts the contours of personal narrative from the collective voice present in these interconnected testimonies. Attuned to stories of lost youth, sexual exploitation, and the dissolution of community and family, Jelen approaches Holocaust testimonies as one would members of a family with their shared experiences and common background, but also as individuals with their own unique voices. Departing from historical methodologies, Jelen models a different, wholistic approach to Holocaust testimonies, one which seeks to make sense of testimonies in the full breadth of their unfolding, across time, across space, and across genre.

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9781666907445

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Reviews

Sheila Jelen's Testimonial Montage is a pathbreaking contribution to literary and narratological approaches to testimony. Jelen demonstrates how techniques of close reading can be made productive for the analysis of survivor testimonies, while still maintaining an appreciation for the dignity and integrity of the survivor's performance of the role of witness. A specific set of testimonies is interpreted in an exemplary manner, reading them both as individual performances of memory while also acknowledging the shared context of their production. Testimonial Montage proposes an ethics of critical but respectful, open-ended but rigorous reading that should resonate widely amongst scholars of testimony. --Peter Davies, University of Edinburgh Sheila Jelen skillfully and sensitively creates a compelling intertextuality between testimonies given by the same group of people at different times, for different purposes, and in different formats. She develops a fascinating close reading of this 'family of testimonies' as literary palimpsests that invite her readers to engage deeply with the people, the historical and continuing trauma, the events, and the past and present contexts of witnessing. --Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, UK

Author Information

Sheila E. Jelen is Zantker Professor of Jewish literature, culture and history at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and the director of the Jewish studies program.

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