Collected Stories in the Life Narratives of Holocaust Survivors

Abstract

This research investigates the use of stories that are found through vicarious experience and told in a life narrative in order to communicate the meaning of the personal past. Through the interpretation of the life narratives of Holocaust survivors, we argue that stories outside of direct experience, collected stories, form the background of personal narratives. Collected stories are pieces of social interaction and context that are integrated in our presentation of the past, and self understanding, because they are personally relevant to us and congruent with the situation of telling. These stories have the potential to lose the indications that they are outside of direct experience and become indistinguishable from other stories that draw upon direct experience. Collected stories serve to situate our stories of the past and identity within a cultural horizon of sense and meaning.As social scientists, we know that words have multiple meanings. Words are the voice of a person as well as the voice of a social group living in a particular historical epoch and culture. The articulation of a personal history and life world, so called life narratives or life stories, can be meaningfully approached from the perspective of the person or the social group. Looking at the life of a single individual, one can understand the significance of words as part of a personal biography that culminates in the present and extends back in time to early childhood

Reverberations of the Armenian Genocide

“…Further narrative scholarship has concentrated on the recounting of historically laden traumatic narratives about the Holocaust (Schiffrin, 2000;Schiff, Noy and Cohler, 2001;Schiffrin, 2006). Within these studies we have come to see how the appropriation of others' stories is an attempt at comprehension of the world, and one's place in it.…”

“…Each interview and commemoration was transcribed in its entirety. When the corpus was complete, I began looking for notable themes, references, and linguistic referents (Schiff, Noy, & Cohler, 2001). The more interviews I conducted, the more the findings were pronounced.…”

“…I did find however, that in some cases interviewees had reviewed genocide historical documents or family history with their parents, both of which are intertextual tenets of the collective voices of remembering (Wertsch, 2002). Collected stories Schiff, Noy, and Cohler (2001) elaborate on linguistic notions germane to narratives and community, especially communities which have endured historic trauma. These authors propose a narrative distinction that is evidenced by linguistic analysis; this is the notion of collected stories and collective memory.…”

“…I use narrative and literary theorists to understand the role that this narrative has in the present for this young population. In particular I draw on Schiff, Noy, and Cohler's (2001) notion of collected stories. These theorists help to explain linguistic evocation of pronoun delineation, deixis, and notions of place as ways which bridge the past to the present.…”

We Knew That’s It: Retelling the Turning Point of a Narrative

“…'), other ex post facto information is seamlessly integrated into the overall texture of what is said. Included in the latter is the incorporation of English itself (a language that most survivors did not know during the Second World War), survivor myths (Wiervocka, 1994) and others' experiences that have become important emblems or icons of collective (rather than personal) experience (Schiff et al, 2001).…”