Toward an Ethnography of Silence

Carol A. Kidron

According to the mourning rituals set forth by Jewish law and tradition, mourners are to create stress-free and comfortable environments--mekomot nekhamah--within which to mourn. Elie Wiesel's Night, Anne Frank's diary, Erica Fischer's Aimée and Jaguar, and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah serve as their respective writers' mekomot nekhamah, providing forums through which they express themselves comfortably and healthily. Using Anne Brener's psychotherapeutic exploration of Jewish mourning rituals, together with Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's analysis of the act of witnessing, I show that the Jewish mourning process relates to these very different forms of Holocaust survivor memoir--autobiography, diary, portrait, and documentary--as a way to read the literature, process it, and understand it. Components of Jewish mourning--such as khevrot, hesped, and yizkor--are also components of Holocaust survivor literature, found in aspects of audience, respect for both the dead and the living, and remembrance. Literary and filmic expressions of traumatic experiences, such as the four texts mentioned above, are no less expressions of grief than the kriah shivah, the traditional rent of clothes to signify deep mourning. Coupled with the indispensable act of witnessing, Holocaust survivor literature becomes gemilut khasadim, acts of kindness, on behalf of Holocaust victims who cannot mourn or remember for themselves.

This article deals with second-generation Holocaust literature, i.e. writings belonging to the generation born after the Holocaust and grown up in its aftermath. Specifically I dwell on two considerably different Jewish-American novels, which reflect two different natures of Holocaust inheritance and, hence, two distinct paths, featuring second- generation Holocaust literature: Thane Rosenbaum’s Second-Hand Smoke (1999) and Irene Dische’s Pious Secrets (1991). My understanding of these narratives is grounded in the cultural distinction between particularist and universalist second-generation Holocaust writers outlined by Alan Berger in Children of Job, American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997). The argument that I present interprets Rosenbaum’s novel as a particularist depiction of the Holocaust legacy, whereas Dische’s book is associated to a universalist perspective towards this event and its inheritance.

This article examines how Holocaust survivors interpret the meaning of specific "iconic," all-absorbing memories that seldom find their way into the survivors' public account of their Holocaust experience. Utilizing the idea of public and private space, and personal and corporate pain as heuristic tools, I examine how survivors organize experience. In the final section, I argue that survivors live with countervailing pressures: the struggle to forget and remain silent and the need to tell and to memorialize. Oral testimony's communal, didactic, and therapeutic nature make it a unique platform for these conflicting forces to work themselves out by transforming narratives of suffering into narratives of witnessing.

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 5 Toward an Ethnography of Silence The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel by Carol A. Kidron CA⫹ Online-Only Material: Supplements A–C Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the “unspeakability” of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendants entail only the “absence of presence” of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster only the wounds of transmitted PTSD. Contrary to the literature, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants depict the survivor home as embedding the nonpathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent, embodied practices, person-object interaction, and person-person interaction. These silent traces form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that sustains familial “lived memory” of the past and transmits tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu. The ethnography of silent memory may also provide a tentative model of nontraumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life. Eve was my tenth child-of-Holocaust-survivor interviewee.1 As had my previous interviewees, Eve began by saying that she did not know anything about her parents’ Holocaust past, because they had never spoken about it, and that she was sorry, but she would probably waste my time. I already knew the routine. Eve, like all the others, would soon begin telling me about her daughter, who had had a transformative experience on her high school “March of the Living” roots trip to Poland and had later developed a close bond with her survivor grandparents. She would recommend that I speak with her daughter instead—the third generation—and I would do so, trying to avoid further “failed” interviews with children of survivors. However, just as I was asking myself how I could salvage my research on trauma-descendant memory-identity work, Eve was silent for a long time and said, But you know the Holocaust was present in my home. My mother would cry in her sleep. It would wake me up and . . . I would put my head under the pillow so not to hear her . . . . I knew that my father would wake her up so she would stop screaming. If it didn’t stop, sometimes I would Carol A. Kidron is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa (Mt. Carmel 31905, Israel [ckidron@soc.haifa.ac.il]). This paper was submitted 30 VIII 07 and accepted 26 VI 08. have to wake him up so he . . . he would stop her. Sometimes she would cry like that twice in one night. This would repeat itself . . . night after night. Although this was a major breakthrough in my research, I was struck by the matter-of-fact and emotionless way Eve told her story. The tale of survivor nightmares and weeping has become an iconic sign of survivor suffering and has been presented in therapeutic literature as a key symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I asked myself, Could it be that Eve experienced her mother’s daily distress and the disturbance to her own sleep as her taken-for-granted everyday life-world, or was I banalizing genocidal trauma and descendant experience?2 After hearing the story, I asked Eve whether she remembered understanding at the time why her mother was crying. She responded, I didn’t know why she was crying, I knew she was having a bad dream, that it must have been something very fright1. All names have been altered for confidentiality. 2. The ethical dilemma of the “banalization” of Holocaust suffering has emerged as a central theme in Holocaust and genocide research; scholars are concerned with the tension between critical deconstruction of Holocaust experience (and with artistic or fictional literary representation) on the one hand and what has been culturally framed as the “hallowed” nature of sublime genocidal suffering on the other. 䉷 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5001-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/595623 6 ening or painful and that it was about the Holocaust. I think my father may have told me it was because of the Holocaust. I didn’t know what she was dreaming about the Holocaust or really what the Holocaust was, but . . . I knew it was about what I didn’t know. A new alternative category of knowing the Holocaust emerged in Eve’s tale, a knowing without words, narrative, or history, a knowing through the body that wakes up at night, night after night, through the habitual taken-for-granted practice of covering one’s head with a pillow and waking up one’s father:3 all silent practices and tacit knowing. After hearing Eve’s tale, I stopped asking interviewees to tell me about their childhood or what they knew about the Holocaust, and instead I asked them if the Holocaust was present in their homes. From then on I was told between 2 and 3 hours of tales on the silent presence of the Holocaust in the everyday life of the survivor home: on the survivor’s body (e.g., the tattooed number), in survivor-descendant face work (e.g., the child’s empathic gaze at the parent silently reminiscing), in person-object interaction (e.g., interacting with familial photos), and in mundane practices of survivors and descendants (e.g., eating all the food on one’s plate). Again, tales were told matter-of-factly, as if the interviewees were telling me of their childhood haunts. All scholarly epistemologies would identify in Eve’s nightly experience and her form of knowing a Holocaust-related emotional wound and would prescribe public verbal articulation as the key to healing. Psychologists such as Langer (1991) would diagnose survivor PTSD and the potential of intergenerationally transmitted PTSD. Talk therapy would elicit the Holocaust tale from the survivors and allow the descendants to work through the void in their lives. Both the Holocaust philosopher, such as Blanchot (1986), and the historian, such as Friedlander (1992), might refer to the “unspeakable” quality of genocidal suffering and call on parent and child to document their fragmented experience. In contrast, revisionist historians and politically conscious social scientists would call our attention to the scars of hegemonic silencing of parent and child and again encourage the survivor family to defiantly voice their tales of suffering. The above epistemologies would also agree that Eve had experienced the presence of absence: her mother’s cries were like Derrida’s (1976) “trace,” signifying the presence of what was no longer, a historical past the daughter would never know. The common metaphor used for this presence of absence—the void—would repeatedly represent the descendant legacy. The deep, repressed selves of the survivor and the descendant and their Holocaust past would become fully present on the surface of the social context only when the silenced or the “unsayable” had been publicly articulated (Handelman 2004). Testimony, talk therapy, or a revisionist voice would 3. Although this recalls Stoller’s (1997, 61) sound-pain, I would like to problematize the explicit link between the sound and pain in Eve’s everyday experience. Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 turn the suffering survivor and descendant from passive objects into healed and redeemed subjects and in the process contribute to the moral salvage mission of collective commemoration. Yet after 55 in-depth ethnographic interviews with children of Holocaust survivors, my findings point to an enormous gap between the above academic discourse and the descendants’ sense of self and recollections of their childhood. Despite their familiarity with the psychological literature, 80% of my interviewees (including Eve), asserted that they were not suffering from the effects of transmitted trauma.4 The great majority did not wish to document their families’ Holocaust history, and an astounding 95% insisted that they would not testify publicly to their parents’ tale or to their own childhood past. Instead of making the past “publicly” present, the majority would be sufficed by the silent presence of surviving remnants of the Holocaust in their domestic lifeworld. Silent parent-child interaction, person-object relations, and mundane practices of survival would suffice. As outlined below, by forming an experiential matrix, these silent traces maintain an intimate and nonpathological presence of the Holocaust death-world in the everyday life-world. How, then, can we explain the gap between academic discourse and the everyday lives of descendants? If we are to question the relevance of available paradigms, we must begin by listening to descendant accounts of their phenomenological experience of silent traces of the past in the survivor home. If these accounts do challenge existing explanatory frames, how may we provide an alternative or supplementary analysis of descendants’ silent memory work, of Eve’s form of “knowing” the past? Rather than marking the absence of the past, could the silent matrix of Holocaust presence function as nonverbal communication and intergenerational “transmission”? Could this silent transmission engender a tacit knowledge of genocide? How might we explain the marginal scholarly interest in silent memory work and the nonpathological transmission of difficult pasts? We turn first to epistemologies of silence that frame our understanding of silent memory. Logocentric Paradigms of Silence When exploring popular cultural and social scientific conceptualizations of silence, one discovers that silence is understood as signifying the absence of speech. Silence, as negatively marked absence, is all the more problematic because it deviates from the Eurocentric psychosocial norm of voice. The absence of voice is understood as signaling psychopathologized processes of avoidance and repression, socially suspect processes of personal secrecy, or collective processes of political subjugation. Whether the issue is personal, communal, or national silence, well-being is thought to be con4. Although 25% had undergone psychosocial therapy, more than half of this sample critiqued the PTSD construct. Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence tingent on the liberation of voice. It is asserted that these logocentric readings have led to a neglect of the phenomenon of silence as a medium of expression, communication, and transmission of knowledge in its own right or as an alternative form of personal knowing that is not dependent on speech for its own objectification. The field of psychology has framed silence as the failure of speech, as dysfunctional absence in need of therapeutic redemption through the restoration of voice. Although Freudian psychodynamic theories have engendered a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding all forms of repressed memories (Illouz 2008), the repression of traumatic memory and the ensuing silence have recently taken center stage (Ballinger 1998). Trauma-related silence is discursively framed as the burial or repression of speech, resulting not from personal volition but rather from the unspeakable nature of an experience that is beyond narrative. The traumatic event is considered to have created a rupture in the linear flow of experience, so that any attempt at verbal representation will inherently resist narrative (Caruth 1995). According to the illness construct of PTSD, trauma survivors, having experienced such a rupture, may suffer from chronic depression, repression of traumatic memories, and incomplete mourning, resulting in emotional hardening or numbness (Barocas and Barocas 1973; Schwartz, Dohrenwend, and Levav 1994).5 The syndrome is thought to often impair survivor parenting, which is described as incapable of affect and intimacy and overprotective of the child (Zilberfein 1995). The literature concludes that descendants may suffer from transgenerationally transmitted effects of PTSD, expressed in a series of maladaptive behavioral patterns and a damaged sense of self (Halik, Rosenthal, and Pattison 1990). The descendant profile includes the repression of emotions, difficulties with intimacy, fear of separation, obsessive involvement in the lives of their parents, failure to separate and individuate, and, finally, potential suboptimal parenting of a new trauma-descendant generation (Kogan 1995).6 According to the therapeutic paradigm of “completing the story,” the survivor and the descendant are called on to undergo talk therapy to reexplore the repressed past and complete “unfinished mourning” within a therapeutic framework (Dasberg 1992, 45). Without this treatment, the trauma victim may be unable to share memories, only to be haunted by silent mem5. For a comprehensive review of the literature on trauma, see Kirmayer, Lemelson, and Barad (2007). For a critical, deconstructivist approach to PTSD, see Young (1995) and Ballinger (1998). For a deconstruction of transmitted PTSD, see Kidron (2003). 6. In contrast to clinical studies, the majority of nonclinical studies have found no significant differences between the second generation and control groups (Bilu and Witztum 1997). Having found no evidence of psychopathology or severe emotional problems, recent studies have tested for alternative attachment behavior and representations (Sagi-Schwartz et. al. 2003; Bar-On et al. 1998). Once again, evidence of maladaptive behavior has not been found. These findings have brought about a shift in terminology in clinical studies from “transmission of trauma” (or “secondary traumatization”) to “intergenerational effects of trauma.” 7 ories and to suffer from PTSD-related symptoms. Having pathologized silent responses to trauma, the literature puts forth the articulation of traumatic memory as personally redemptive (Leys 1996; see CA⫹ online supplement A).7 The approach of Holocaust and genocide studies to silence may be seen as a composite of the foundational assumptions of psychological trauma theory and those of the “philosophers of genocide” (see supplement A).8 Adorno’s ([1949] 1975) critical statement—that there can be no poetry after the Holocaust—is emblematic of the field’s approach to silence as signifying the ineffability of the disaster (Blanchot 1986), the limits of its representation, and the ultimate absence of its presence. Scholars such as White (1992), La Capra (1994), and Friedlander (1992) struggle with the ethical and practical question of how one may produce a history of genocide when the event is beyond words, beyond narrative, and thus beyond representation. In keeping with Derrida’s (1976) negative dialectics, semiotically speaking, if the Holocaust was sublime, unlike anything that had preceded it (Kristeva 1980; Lyotard 1983), what could possibly signify or represent the event? Turning to therapeutic precepts, genocide historians and therapists would attempt to access previously repressed and absent “deep memory,” allowing it to rise to the social surface and become present (Langer 1991). Once accessed, survivor accounts would not only be therapeutic for the survivor but also would contribute to testimonial knowledge toward commemorative history (Young 1988). One might ask, however, What of the nonverbal, intersubjective, embodied, and material traces of the past in everyday life, forms of knowledge that resist articulation and collective enlistment? Do these traces subsist as “deep”/repressed memory below the social surface? How might these nonnarrative forms of presence signify the presence of the past? Perhaps it would be left to anthropology to trace this form of presence in everyday life.9 7. The term “pathologization” is used in the tradition of psychological anthropology and medical anthropology, in which cultural discourse and practice that constitute or interpret embodied or emotive signs are identified as symptoms of physical or emotional illness or distress (whether or not they are “essentially” pathological or phenomenologically experienced as such). In certain settings, the identification and construction of illness might then culminate in diagnoses and biomedical treatment (i.e., the process of medicalization). 8. Readings of speech and silence in philosophy may be seen as foundational in the approach of these philosophers of genocide (see supplement A). These readings present silence as a failure of speech, silenced speech, a prelude to speech, or an alternative “speech” that can only long for verbal articulation. For a discussion of these approaches, see Gurevitch (2001). 9. Psychology’s foundational assumptions regarding trauma have saturated scholarship in almost all fields of the social sciences and humanities. In particular, sociology, collective-memory studies, and culture studies have explored the sociopolitical construction of collective silence and forgetting/silencing and the collectively therapeutic role of voice. The fields of narrative studies, discourse analysis, and symbolic interactionism have also explored silence, but primarily as a backdrop to speech (see supplement A). 8 Anthropologies of Genocide and Memory The holistic and emic perspectives of anthropology could pave the way for a more grounded exploration of silent memory work and deconstruct the paradigms framing our understanding of the presence of the past in everyday life. By challenging reductionist readings of the survivor and descendant profiles as silent/silenced, emotionally wounded, and collectivized, anthropological research methods would allow the survivor and descendant subjects to articulate the experience of silence and the everyday practices of silent forms of interaction. There have, however, been surprisingly few attempts to apply such an approach to genocide-related phenomena, with the great majority of anthropological studies focusing only on the methodological, ethical, and political implications of giving voice to silenced genocide victims (Scheper-Hughes 2002) or on monumental/hegemonic institutional commemorative practices (Feldman 2008; Handelman 1990). The newly emergent subfield of the anthropology of genocide (Hinton 2004) has, in fact, presented a culture-sensitive portrayal of the effect of trauma and alternative forms of representation and commemoration (Dwyer 2004). However, the act of ethnography and the documentation of the voices of traumatized respondents has also taken the form of a moral and political mission, as the anthropologist-turned-activist serves to liberate trauma victims from the “shadows of silence” (Waterston and RylkoBauer 2006). With silence as the battleground of this academic crusade, failures to verbalize painful pasts become highly charged and contested objects of research. When survivor silence is conceived solely as politically and ideologically loaded absence, ethnography fails to seek phenomenological accounts of the silent presence of the past.10 In the emerging field of the anthropology of memory (Werbner 1998), scholars have in fact called for a shift in attention away from theoretical accounts of the discourses of memory toward more grounded research on the actual practices of nonmonumental memory. Pioneering works by White (2000), Cole (2001), Cattell and Climo (2002), Berliner (2005), and Argenti (2007) have presented ethnographies of embodied memory. Yet in keeping with the (macro) tradition of social-memory studies (Olick and Levy 1997; Di Paolantonio 2000), they continue to highlight the dialectical points of the nexus between macro processes of hegemonic and/or colonial and postcolonial violence and their subjects’ em10. Throughout the review of the literature, the term “political” has been used to signify scholarly conceptions of silenced memories or embodied practices of memory as having been either hegemonically silenced and or forgotten, thus disempowering those who silently remember, or interest in processes of recollection and rearticulation of silenced memory as acts of reempowerment. Although all forms of memory can be political if the act of memory is experienced as an outcome of power relations or as concerned with empowerment, not all memory work hinges equally on power relations and empowerment and power-related memories may also be examined as process and practice while temporarily bracketing practice from its political-discursive context. Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 bodied pasts.11 Thus, those who have embodied the past are again read as performing grassroots practices of hegemonic memory, resistant memory, or countermemory. I propose, however, that the lived experience of embodying or interacting with traces of the past may not always be politically motivated or performed as acts of resistance or as capitulation to hegemonic indoctrination or appropriation. Thus, despite the great salience of this macro-micro nexus, scholarly interest in the political instrumentalization of memory and/or the political semiotics of memory work (the way memory has been put to work to re-present politically meaningful/forgotten pasts) has elided a closer examination of the mechanics of the micro pole of the axis in its own right, namely, the way in which everyday, taken-for-granted mnemonic practices are constituted, sustained, and intergenerationally transmitted to create the silent yet no less living presence of the past.12 In order to focus on the way memory silently “works” and is made present in everyday life, this ethnographic study presents trauma-descendant accounts of the silent presence of the genocidal past in their familial life-worlds. Methodology As part of a comprehensive research project entailing ethnographic interviews and participant observation 11. Lambek and Antze’s (1996) Tense Past must be seen as the true pioneer in the field of memory-identity work. Although it presents a wide range of scholarship on difficult pasts, this volume did not, however, focus on mundane and tacit practices of memory. The scholars cited above have all uniquely contributed to the ethnographic data on the way memories of the past are encapsulated in nonverbal collective ritual practices and inscribed in the performing body (Werbner 1998; Cole 2001; Berliner 2005; Argenti 2007) and/or the way the past is emotively remembered by individuals responsive to the limits of hegemonic remembering or forgetting (Climo 1995; White 2000; Berliner 2005). Kleinman and Kleinman (1991) have also discussed their subjects’ experience as the nexus between “microcultural and infrapolitical processes,” and they have focused on the illness and health of medicalized and pathologized selves. Although the research presented here shares many of the subdisciplinary foci of these studies, this paper aims to trace the practices sustaining the tacit presence of difficult pasts in everyday mundane (nonritual) and domestic (noncollective) life. 12. A number of studies in the subdisciplines of anthropology of material culture, and anthropology of place and a few exceptional works in the anthropology of memory have explored various aspects of mnemonic experience relevant to this study. Bahloul (1992) and Stewart (1993) offer fascinating insights into processes of private domestic memory, yet they do not deal with difficult pasts. Stoller’s (1997) seminal work provides insights into the sensuous aspects of certain embodied memories. Williams’s (2003) intriguing work on the silent interaction of Gypsy familial memory provides important parallels with my case study, although there are important differences. In addition, such scholars as Feld and Basso (1996), Bell (1997), and Turnbull (2002) have explored the nexus of landscapes, places, and, in some cases, tacit memory, yet they, too, do not focus on difficult pasts. Carsten’s (2007) important volume on kinship and memory deals with familial memory, transmission, and difficult pasts, but the majority of papers echo the assumption that traumatic pasts must be contextualized within macro processes and will engender scarred or challenged relations. Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence (2001–2003), I conducted 55 in-depth interviews with children of Holocaust survivors in Israel (Kidron 2005). The sample was recruited using the snowball method; respondents ranged in age between 35 and 55, with 30 (54%) women and 25 (46%) men. The great majority were born in Israel to survivor parents who had emigrated to Israel from Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s after surviving Nazi extermination camps, forced-labor camps, ghetto incarceration, or periods of hiding (see CA⫹ online supplement supplements B, C). After an initial period of economic hardship, the majority achieved middle- to upper-middle-class status, and the majority of descendants acquired some form of higher education. In-depth interviews were conducted in a semistructured, thematic format. Interviewees were asked open-ended questions concerning their childhood and the present, allowing them to narrate the self as they saw fit. In accordance with the concept of “narrative truth,” the issue at hand was not whether they presented their “true” identities (Lieblich, TuvalMashiach, and Zilber 1998, 7–8) but the ways in which they narratively constructed and selectively represented selfhood.13 I believe that my insider status as a child of Holocaust survivors and my willingness to recollect and share my own personal memories with the descendants facilitated my entry into their intimate and silent life-/death-world. Results The Matrix of Silence Descendants recounted the nonverbal and partially verbal traces of the Holocaust interwoven in everyday life. These traces form a vital experiential matrix of Holocaust presence in the private domain. The matrix entailed the following “media” of presence: silent survivor-descendant interaction with surviving artifacts of the death-world, descendant virtual interaction with ghosts of the Holocaust dead, survivordescendant face/emotion work, practices of survival carried over from the Holocaust, and parent-child dialogic interaction in the form of dicta and fragments of mythic tales of survival. This paper focuses on person-object interaction, personperson interaction, and practices of survival. Person-Object Interaction and the Embodiment of Memento Mori When asked about the presence of the past in the childhood home, descendants recalled the presence of material traces as part and parcel of everyday household life. These material traces are depicted as integral “actors” in the drama of 13. Questions attempted to elicit responses along the following themes: past and present parental behavior and parent-child relationship; childhood memories of Holocaust-related dialogue, storytelling, and/or practices in the home; past and present “consumption” of Holocaust-related discourse and cultural products; participation in Holocaust-related practices in the public domain; and envisioned future of commemorative practices. See supplement B for further details. 9 survivor-descendant interaction, functioning as bridges to the Holocaust past. The objects fall into two categories: those embedded in the survivor’s body (i.e., the tattooed number and wartime scars) and surviving “freestanding” artifacts of the death-world (e.g., a utensil from Auschwitz or prewar family photographs). Both categories function ambiguously as both mundane household objects and sanctified repositories for the presence of the absent past. The blue number tattooed on the survivor’s arm has become one of the most powerful symbols of the authentic presence of the Holocaust past. It is the epitome of the physical trace, metonymically signifying the presence of the past, yet unlike the footprint, it does not wear away with time. In the 1950s and 1960s, the tattooed number “gave away” survivors, who at times felt ashamed of their past, some hiding the tattoo under long sleeves and others surgically removing the number (Lentin 2000). Changing discourses surrounding victimization and the impending demise of the survivor generation have recently transformed public response to one of veneration. Although remaining on the “private” survivor’s arm, the number has been appropriated as material witness to the dehumanization of genocide. As Primo Levi asserts, “my tattoo has become a part of my body. I don’t glory in it . . . but I don’t erase it since there are not many to bear witness” (Levi 1989, 118). The metonymic symbol having been collectivized, little attention has been paid to the role of the tattooed number in survivor parent–child relations.14 When asked about the presence of the Holocaust in her home, Hannah began her account with her “discovery” of the tattoo on her mother’s arm: H: I guess the first thing that comes to mind is my mother’s tattoo . . . . The first time I remember noticing it was when we were on the bus . . . . I looked at other people’s arms and saw that they didn’t have one. I asked her why the others didn’t have a number like hers. She answered, “Don’t talk nonsense.” I got upset and told her to take it off. When she didn’t respond, I touched it to see if it was connected . . . or, you know, like a Band-Aid that you could take off. She got very angry at me and pulled down her sleeve. C: Did you ask her about it again? H: No, you know, you just figure out somehow when you’re not supposed to push something sensitive. Of course later on . . . I knew, but somehow I never forgot that feeling of wanting to rub it off like . . . like a stain or something. 14. Beyond brief references in descendant memoirs to survivors’ public embarrassment (Burkitt 2002), little is known of person-object relations surrounding the tattoo. 10 Hannah’s text recounts her discovery of her mother’s Otherness. Her mother’s difference lies in the “corporeal ambiguity” of her tattoo as an object physically embedded in the corporeal self, totally blurring the boundaries between human subject and material object (Seaton 1987). Is the tattoo “connected”—an inseparable part of her mother’s arm—or is it a removable sign like Hannah’s “Band-Aid”? Is it part of her mother’s subjective corporeal self or is it object? As in Saunders’s analysis of bullets transformed into trench art (“mixing metal with flesh”; Saunders 2000, 53), here we have the permanent, chemical-based, Nazi serial number inscribing murderous bureaucratic efficiency in flesh. Unlike freestanding memento mori, the tattoo cannot be discarded or permanently hidden in a drawer; neither can it pass as a mundane, non-Holocaust-related object. The tattoo’s permanence and almost seamless yet disturbing incongruent presence on the body are revealed when Hannah touches it, attempting to remove the embodied sign and thereby discovering that it is inseparably “entangled” in her mother’s physical self. Here the visceral sense of touch is critical in Hannah’s “body-felt” formative contact with the Holocaust past (Stoller 1997). Revisionist readings of descendant experience might contextualize Hannah’s story as evidence of the humiliation and collective silencing of the survivor family (Lentin 2000). Yet when asked to explain why she wanted to rub the tattoo off, Hannah referred again to the incongruence between body and object, stating, “it just didn’t seem to belong on her arm.” One might read the text as a child’s innocent response yet insist that it is witness to the traumatic plight of the survivor family forced to come to terms with the altered semiotics of the death-world (Wyschogrod 1985). Although valid, such ideologically loaded frames “cut out” mundane responses critical to an understanding of the descendant experience of embodied memory. Depicting her discovery of the tattoo, Penny recounted with a very large smile, I remember . . . when I first . . . I mean when I noticed my father’s number. I must have been about 4. I asked him why I don’t have one, too. Seeing my surprise, Penny giggled and said, Sure, why not? . . . He had one! . . . Why are you surprised? . . . Kids don’t know!” Continuing the story, she recounted, He laughed . . . and said I don’t get to have one. I said but I wanted a number too, like his [long laugh] . . . . He looked at me very seriously and said bad people did it to him and that I shouldn’t want one. Penny’s story is shocking in its lighthearted depiction of a child’s “healthy” curiosity. As in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, she turns the tables on the logic of the death-world, playing its game by demanding her own number. In contrast to our conception of a traumatic constitutive moment, the text not only normalizes the discovery of the tattoo but also depicts Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 Penny as still irreverently amused. Her explanation—“Why not? . . . Kids don’t know”—forces the listener to reconsider the child’s taken-for-granted life-world, where a number on a parent’s arm, devoid of historical or cultural reference, might seem like a removable Band-Aid or, in Penny’s case, a coveted accessory. Echoing Levi’s reference to the tattoo as “part of his body,” we also realize that, experientially, descendants notice the tattoo only when comparing a parent’s arm to other arms. At first, the tattooed arm, as a parental arm, is all they “know.” The arm later becomes ambiguous when compared to other arms, but the tattoo is then reconceptualized as an inseparable part of the parent’s arm and not, as one might suppose, as a walking “lieu de mémoire” (Nora 1989). Although Hannah is not provided with the tattoo’s historical trajectory, Penny’s father does tell her why she “shouldn’t want one.” However, for Penny this is not the heart of the anecdote she wants to tell; rather, she has framed her story as evidence of her own precocious nature and a subversive attempt to deconstruct descendant suffering. What the listener anticipates will be a Holocaust tale of emotionally jarring sequelae is presented as a mundane tale of precocious behavior. In contrast, Ricki is guided by the historical and symbolic significance of her father’s tattoo: I used to sit with my father and stare at his number . . . long and hard . . . [long pause, tears well up in her eyes]. I would try to imagine what it was like to be . . . branded. What it felt like when they burned it into his flesh. Did it hurt? Was he scared? I would stare until [her voice breaks] . . . . I could [she can’t speak, long pause] . . . until I could . . . [she composes herself with difficulty] . . . feel it on my arm. This moving text begins in mundane everyday life; its opening frame—“I used to sit with my father . . .”—orients the listener to a recurring event (Young 1987). It does not point, as in Hannah or Penny’s stories, to the one-time event of the discovery but instead points to what seems like a habitual domestic practice. Ricki utilizes the tattoo as Bell’s (1997) “portable place,” a medium of chronotopic travel capable of taking her to her father’s Holocaust past. Despite temporal/spatial barriers, if she stares long enough, she may accomplish the empathic feat of vicariously “being together in concerted time” (Sharon 1982) with her father during his “branding.” She seeks not factual knowledge of why or when or by whom this was done to her father but rather to know whether it hurt or scared him. Ricki longs for what Young describes as a shared experiential world via the “memory of the flesh” (Young 2002, 25). Yet how could Ricki possibly feel the branding of her own arm? One might refer to this vicarious experience as a “phantom of desire” (Young 2002, 45). Just as an amputee may feel a missing leg, Ricki might “break apart objective reality to create an alternative” (p. 45), phantom experience. But before borrowing the analogy, one must consider that Ricki has never been branded. How, then, could Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence she imagine the experience? Psychological discourse might diagnose Ricki as suffering from heteropathic identification (Silverman in Hirsch 1997, 273, n6), the pathological ability to take on the memory of others. Young (2002, 45), however, asserts that “patterns of love, yearning and desire” can create a sense of embodiment even if that past has not been personally experienced. Ricki’s memory work with the tattoo clearly recalls Latour’s (1996) “actant,” the object whose relational will or force affects Ricki as agent as she interacts with her father through material culture in the practices of everyday life. It should also be noted that Ricki breaks down in the middle of her account. Her cry-talking (Katz 1999, 208) aesthetically conveys and bridges two symbolically incommensurate worlds, the mundane interview event in the present and her intense childhood empathic journey to her father’s past. The tattoo, as embodied object, and her crying, as embodied emotional response, may be seen as critical conduits linking incommensurable chronotopes and incommensurable forms of interaction. “Mementos in Flight” from the Death-World Descendants also describe person-object interaction with surviving artifacts carried away in flight from the death-world. Although, like the embodied tattoos, these freestanding objects can be shown to make the absent past present, at work here is the feat of imagining the kinetics of everyday objectperson relations in practice and, to a lesser extent, the vicarious feeling of bodily pain. Rather than imagining what something felt like on the body, one imagines what it was like to use or do something with an object. When telling me about the presence of Holocaust in her home, Michelle excused herself and returned proudly with a tablespoon in her hand. I stared at the spoon, wondering why she was showing me a spoon in the middle of our interview. She told me, smiling, “This was my mother’s spoon.” Still confused, I politely said, “Really,” sensing that I should be responding to something of importance but having no idea what it was. Realizing that I did not have a clue, she smilingly explained, “This was my mother’s spoon in Auschwitz. This is what she ate with, you know, the soup.”15 Attempting to restore my professional composure despite my surprise, I asked her where the spoon was kept in her parent’s home, thinking that it must have been in some closed cabinet for safekeeping. She explained with a broader smile, It was in the kitchen, in the drawer, with the other utensils 15. The prisoner’s bowl and spoon were coveted objects because survival depended on them. Holocaust testimonies and photographic and cinematic representations have depicted the survivor’s experience of receiving one ration of soup and subsisting on minimal sustenance. These objects and their representations have taken on an iconic quality. 11 . . . . We ate with it. My mother fed me my morning oatmeal with it. At this point I was shocked. The phenomenology of the spoon from Auschwitz strikingly echoes the literature on material culture in everyday life. Seremetakis (1994) provides an eloquent account of the practice of Greek grandmothers who fed their grandchildren by chewing the food to be placed in the grandchild’s mouth so that, via the intimate bodily experience of nurturance, intergenerational transmission of memory and meaning could take place. According to Seremetakis, it is the silent sensory experience of sharing food that encapsulates the personal, familial, and collective past without narrative. Although one may wonder, as I frankly did, about the blasphemy of mundane use of a “sacred” symbol, Seremetakis asserts the contrary: it is only when the trajectory of the object moves forward into the present and future, enmeshed in the everyday sensuous life of the household, that its semiotic meaning is preserved. Not only is socially enmeshed material practice highlighted, but relations with others are facilitated vis à vis the object (Latour 1996), enabling the embodiment of social relations of love, caring, and commitment. I asked Michelle how she understood her mother’s choice to keep the spoon in use at home and not, for example, in a museum. Her response was enlightening in its simplicity: Look, she won, she survived with that spoon. Every time she fed me or my sister she probably said to herself, “Hah, I won—not only didn’t I die, but this spoon that kept me alive is now feeding my children.” I was left with open questions. At home in the private domain, did the spoon retain its aura of a sacred symbol, or was it just a spoon? If at home it was just a spoon, does that mean that in the museum it was just a sacred symbol of all Auschwitz spoons, losing the personal link to Michelle’s mother as the individual survivor who ate with it and thus no longer a personal symbol of daily survival? Would the lived presence of the life-giving utensil then shift into the representation of the horrors of death?16 Would it then become part of the collective monumental storehouse, or what Nora (1989) termed “dead memory”? If so, had I stumbled on an account of the phenomenology of embodied memory tightly interwoven with the everyday social milieu, what Nora (1989) and Halbwachs (1980) meant by “lived memory”? Beth began her account by telling me that the entire presence of Holocaust in her home “was concentrated in a drawer in her parent’s bedroom.” Her father would periodically go into the room and lock the door. Having occasionally been allowed to be with him in the room, she depicts his “visits” to the drawer: B: The drawer was in his dresser, next to his bed. It was his secret place, where he kept things close to his 16. I thank one of the reviewers for this interesting question. 12 Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 heart . . . He would open the drawer and begin taking out a picture of himself with his parents from before the war and a collection of toys he had salvaged from his childhood. The toys included magnets, a train, and marbles. The minute he opened the drawer, his face changed. He became softer, more gentle, and . . . more alive. In our everyday life he was . . . a zombie . . . you could see the death in his eyes . . . . But when he opened the drawer and took out his things it was like he was taken back to his life before the Holocaust . . . to his childhood. He reenacted intimate moments of his childhood, playing with his magnets, smiling at his family in the picture. The drawer for me was like an enchanted forest . . . not just because of its content but because I could be with the person I never really knew. We would sit together on his bed while he “played” with his things. It was really . . . intimate . . . I guess you could say that symbolically he opened himself up when he opened up the drawer. It was his black box, you know, like a plane, what made him who he was. He never told me anything about the toys or the people in the picture, no story, but by the way he acted . . . like a child . . . and the way he wouldn’t let any of us open the drawer ourselves or touch his things, we knew he was back there. C: I don’t really understand what you mean about him being a zombie and coming alive with the drawer. B: The way he was when he played with the drawer, so different, so alive . . . we had to realize that his life with us was not real to him . . . because he never really left his past. That drawer was a miniature of his real life. With us outside the drawer he was . . . dead. There was no connection between his two lives—just the drawer—when it was closed it separated the before and after the Holocaust, and when open, like a gateway into his past it let him go back to his childhood. Beth’s moving account of her father’s visits to the drawer offers extensive insights into the silent experiences of both the presence of absence and the absence of presence in the survivor home. Beth depicts her father’s processual movement into the bedroom, into the drawer, and finally into interaction with the relics from his childhood past. With every step closer to the drawer, the father travels in time back into his prewar life and to his revivified prewar self. The use of domestic space to activate chronotopic shifting into the past recalls both Yates’s (1978) analysis of the use of topographic architectural layouts as a material scaffold along which one may gradually trigger recall and Turnbull’s (2002, 131) account of the movement through architectural space as constituting and embodying a nonverbal spatial and temporal narrative that can be performed by the subject and read by spectators without the spoken word. This movement toward the drawer thus resurrects the past in and through space, just as the exposure of the objects in the drawer to different degrees of “approaching” access and practice, not only constitutes the past in the present but also transforms “and makes the consciousness of subjects” as they move back into and perform the past (Turnbull 2002, 134). Once again, a person-object interaction semiotically and sensuously resurrects the past. Beth’s father’s smiling gaze into the images of his parents and his ritual play with the toys of his childhood animate the images and objects and consequently make the previously absent past virtually present. Unlike, however, Turnbull’s monolithic public structures and the mundane spoon analyzed above, the survivor’s drawer and its contents are exceedingly private, hidden from view, and forbidden to even his children without supervision. How can one understand the extreme closure of the relics of the Holocaust past? Moving beyond psychotherapeutic frames in which secretly coveted transitional objects encapsulate the traumatized or displaced self (Winnicot in Parkin 1999), we may consider the assertion by Turnbull (2002) and Latour (1996) that in order to preserve the structural integrity and semiotic meaning of material objects, one must maintain the original person-object relations and prevent object deformation (Turnbull 2002, 95). This would imply that, unlike the spoon (as a trophy of survival in everyday practice), the toys could be used only by Beth’s father, just as his pictures could be viewed only privately with his protective eyes. Nevertheless, as in Williams’s (2003) account of hallowed ancestral objects among the Manus Gypsies, these relics, too, despite the reverence, preserve the silent presence of the past by means of everyday person-object interaction. Beth’s reflexive account adds an additional layer to the resurrection of the past, namely, the transformation of the demeanor and selfhood of the survivor as he enters and exits his past. When opening the drawer, the survivor becomes “softer, more gentle, and more alive,” in sharp contrast to his everyday cold, distant, and “dead” or “zombielike” behavior.17 This powerful depiction portrays a sharp dichotomy between her father’s daily self-presentation as one “who had death in his eyes” and his playful and happy moments when reunited with his past. Beth’s calling her father a zombie may recall for us Agamben’s (1991) living dead, yet unlike those “Musselmen,” Beth’s father is capable of alternating along the border of life and death, childishly alive in his virtual deathworld and dead when moving among the living.18 Beth, however, offers a painful portrayal of her father’s life in the present, asserting not only that he was “dead” around the living but that his life in the present “was not real to him 17. Again, it might be noted that, in contrast to the symptomatology of the flashback as only emotionally agonizing, here we see that the “visitations” to the past may have a positive nostalgic component. 18. The evoked world is not the death-world of the camps but rather the pre-Holocaust world. However, many survivors claim that this evokes the death-world because it destroyed the pre-Holocaust life-world. Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence . . . because he never left the past.” This jarring account implies that even when leaving the virtual space of the drawer, he never totally disconnects from the past or fully experiences his present life. The drawer presents a highly complex mnemonic mechanism. Capable of encapsulating the frozen past and animating that past during survivor visits, the drawer also functions as a powerful “gateway” separating temporal and spatial dimensions and activating the alternate selves of the survivor (playful/zombie) as he moves in and out of its space. Thus, more complex than Parkin’s (1999) transitional object, which temporarily acts as repository of the traumatized/displaced self and later returns its contents to the resettled self, the drawer is a permanent “black box,” periodically dormant or animated and fluid. As the descendant spectator, Beth experiences her father’s virtual world and his alternating selfhood with the utmost reflexivity. She admits to sitting in total silence with her father, unable or unwilling to elicit stories about the photograph and toys and forbidden from directly interacting with his relics. However, before diagnosing Beth as the victim of her father’s traumatic emotional numbness and apathy, let us explore her experience as she narrates it. Her moments with her father allow her to “enter his enchanted forest,” “to be with the person she never really knew,” and to share, albeit passively, in the “intimacy” of his playful imaginary world. By no means belittling the empathic challenge of interacting with the “zombie” that he was during the great majority of her childhood, Beth nonetheless paints a dual picture of parental emotional absence alongside moments of intense emotional presence and sharing when he “opened up.” As with Ricki’s jarring empathic exchange via her father’s tattoo, one must move beyond the death-related context of interaction to uncover the underlying silent connection, interaction, and “communication.” If, as Wardi (1990) asserts, the descendant child grows up sensing that he or she never actually knows the parent’s true self, then it is during these moments of virtual copresence in the past that the child can “go back there” with the parent(s) and encounter, in Beth’s words, “what made them who they are.” The intensely intimate process of parent-child movement into the Holocaust past entails the feat of synchronizing chronotopic worlds, allowing father and child to “be together in time” (Sharon 1982) despite (or precisely because of) the absence of narrative history. The Reenactment of Practices of Survival The final form of the silent presence of the Holocaust in the survivor home is the network of mundane practices carried over from the death-world. Although diverse, these practices entail habitual everyday “strategies of survival” in the face of feared hunger, cold, and illness that function to guarantee physical well being, self-preservation, and sustenance. The “lived body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962), as receptacle of past corporeal sensuous experience, is the key conduit for the re- 13 presentation of past sensations of bodily distress. The selfsame body then responds to present distress by reenacting Holocaust-related strategic precautionary practices, as the fearful, cold, sick, or hungry body remembers and reenacts the strategies perceived to have saved it. Transposing Bourdieu’s (1989) conceptualization of “habitus” as embedded and perpetuated social stratification, survivor practices embed the corporeal experience and strategic scenarios of survival.19 One may ask, then, whether this form of sensuous experience and the resultant practices are part and parcel of the descendant legacy. Some descendants recount their experience of survivor practices (e.g., hoarding food, obsessive use of blankets and illness prevention, dangerously testing the limits of their survivor skills), while others depict their own learned/inherited practices of survival. In both cases, the network of habitual Holocaust-related practices tightly weaves the presence of the past into the daily fabric of domestic life. Practices of Self-Preservation in a Mortally Dangerous World When asked about the presence of the Holocaust in the survivor home, Emma recounted her nightly practice of preparing for the Nazis: E: The one aspect of daily life that I can link to the Holocaust was that every night, at a very young age, maybe 6 or 7, I would prepare my shoes, placing them next to my bed, so that if the Nazis came I would have shoes ready. I would also fold my clothes in a way that would be easy to put on. C: Do you know where you got this habit? E: I remember placing the shoes in the center of the floor in front of my bed so that if I had to get up and I had to wear the shoes in a hurry I would be able to. Why were shoes so important? My mother apparently told me how she walked in the snow. I remember her saying how cold it was, how she almost froze to death. Now I know it was the Death March. Then it didn’t matter what it was, just that it was something terrible. Then I just desperately wanted to have shoes handy . . . so that I wouldn’t have to walk barefoot in the snow, so I would prepare it in such a way, so that if the Nazis came . . . I specifically took the Nazi as the enemy, because it was so terrible. Now it wasn’t that my mother sat down and told me what had happened to her. I think I just picked up on all sorts of things that floated in the home. 19. Although de Certeau (1984) also deals with mundane everyday practices, his emphasis on these practices as a form of subtle resistance moves beyond the context of the present case. 14 C: I don’t really understand how you can pick up on things without being told. E: I remember bits of a story I heard about how shoes were really important, like how someone got so hungry that they cooked their shoes and ate the leather. So I didn’t make it up, my imagination was not that developed, I guess I just put things together. As in the cases of person-object interaction above, Emma phenomenologically experiences the presence of the Holocaust in the silent micro-moments and micro-acts of daily life (Bakhtin 1981). The habitual practices of preparing for bed and laying out one’s clothes are shaped by association with the distant conditions of the Holocaust death-world. For the 7-year-old Emma, shoes were not merely another recklessly worn piece of attire but an essential tool of survival that, if carefully prepared in advance, would allow her to walk in the freezing snow. As she describes her nightly habit, she recounts her “inner talk” (Bakhtin 1981) of strategically planning the best position for her shoes in readiness of a hurried departure. When I asked Emma to trace the source of her practice, she repeated again the habitual motions of placing the shoes in the front of her bed, as if both the cause and the effect of her mundane past were stored and remembered in the motions of the kinetic body. The repetition of Emma’s childhood bodily motions take her, like someone attempting to recall where they misplaced something, back to micro acts in which “the material and the mental interact” (Turnbull 2002), conflating the Holocaust chronotope with her 1950s childhood bedtime preparations and potentially allowing her to recall the initial source of her practice. However, despite her repetition of the “motions,” Emma insists that she does not recall being directly taught to prepare her shoes for a death march, nor did she “sit down” with her mother to be told a full narrative of her ordeal. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 137) assertion that practice is prereflective, consciousness for Emma is primarily a pragmatic matter of “I can do” a practice rather than an intellectual “I know why I do it.” Attempting nevertheless to trace the source of her practice, Emma recounts that she was “apparently” told a fragmented story about her mother’s walk in the snow and that she “picked up on all sorts of things that floated in the home” and then “put things together.” Perhaps Emma’s reference to “picking up on things floating in the home” signifies what Ruth Wajnryb (2001, 192) terms “Holocaust Dicta,” one-sentence survivor references to Holocaust conditions, such as cold or hunger, told to children out of context to critically remind them to appreciate the comforts of their lives. Her mother may perhaps have unintentionally “given off” (Goffman 1959) her partial tale when present conditions triggered an association. Alternatively, Emma may have been a ratified eavesdropper (Goffman 1961, 131) of her mother’s tale told to visitors. Hoping that Emma Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 might recall a storytelling event, I asked her to explain how one “picks up on things” without being told. She responded by telling me what has become a frequently cited “Holocaust legend” of survivors eating shoe leather, which, she explained, also instilled the importance of shoes as a tool of survival.20 Yet she could not tell me who told her this story. Perhaps it was “borrowed” from a popular cultural account. Moving processually away from her tacit childhood experience and into public knowledge, Emma’s final narrative layer identifies her mother’s “walk in the snow” as “the Death March,” an actual, historicized Holocaust event. Only the adult Emma, now well read in Holocaust history, could possibly trace her childhood habit to a collective historical founding event. In an attempt to understand this descendant practice, we turn to psychological trauma theory. Psychologists Auerhahn and Laub (1998, 30–31) assert that Holocaust-related practices performed by survivors are in fact “traumatic grafts” or “transferences” from the Holocaust past, “experiential fragments inappropriately transplanted upon present life situations.” These practices are said to range from the psychotic and delusional to the neurotic. Exposure to Holocaust “grafts” is thought to transmit to the descendant not only the inappropriate practices but also their embedded messages of potential danger, hardship, and loss forever in one’s wake. Tyano (1997), too, asserts that inherited practices depict how the survivor’s sense of immanent mortal danger and “primary will to survive” are transmitted to the descendant as part of a wider network of trauma-related symptoms. However, the theory of trauma transmission, like many psychological conceptualizations of abstract cognitive and emotional forms of knowing (Hacking 1996), fails to outline the actual process and practice of “transmission” and “reception” of the parental past and its strategic lessons for the present. Attempts to outline the process of intergenerational transmission have given us a plethora of terms, such as “vicarious identification,” “secondary traumatization” (Figley 1995), and even the metaphysical term “osmosis,” yet all these terms and implied “processes” fail to depict the way that survivors “give off” their experience of trauma or the way that their descendants internalize and embody the effects of trauma. In contrast, Emma’s account successfully traces the way the Holocaust is tacitly made present via corporeal experience and how that experience is engendered by diverse, taken-for-granted, silent, semiverbal, and textual media in the 20. Both descendants and nondescendants are familiar with iconic Holocaust tales that have become part of the collective repertoire of Holocaust memory. Although to do so seemingly challenges the sanctity of Holocaust memory, one might assert that, like urban legends, some of these tales are of questionable veracity, yet they have nonetheless captured public imagination. The story of eating shoe leather came up in a number of interviews. Although one need not question the fact that this may have happened in the Holocaust, one might consider the effect of the popular cultural media image of Chaplin’s comic rendition of the starved hobo cooking and attempting to eat his shoes and the way this image might intertwine with popular cultural iconic tales of Holocaust starvation. Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence survivor home. In keeping with Lyotard’s critique of the mechanical metaphor of transmission (Lyotard and Larochelle 1992), rather than conceiving of the past as having been mechanically transmitted from one person to the other or from one point in time to the another, Emma’s experience of Holocaust presence points to multiple sources of perpetual presence and empathic sensuous, visceral, and cognitive “responses” to that presence throughout the home. Inheriting the “Empty Plate.” In popular cultural accounts of survivor family life, “obsessive” food-related behavior is perhaps the most extensively cited practice. Interviewed descendants did, in fact, almost unanimously mention either hoarding stocks of food in preparation for the next catastrophe and/or frantic parental pressure to finish the food on one’s plate to avoid the “sacrilege” of discarding food. Tales ranged from the extreme of placing food surreptitiously in one’s pocket at weddings to 50-pound sacks of sugar in the cupboard (thought normative until visiting other homes). Recalling the tragic tales of wartime starvation and the critical magnitude of daily bread rations, the great majority of descendants recounted bread-related practices. Hannah sardonically described the “recycling” of bread: Bread was the most holy object in the house. They almost worshipped it. Every piece they ate was like . . . I don’t know . . . like reliving the moment they almost died of hunger and were saved by that piece of bread. So you never throw out bread, because it’s always as if it was that piece of bread . . . you eat old bread until it’s dry and then you turn it into toast, then breadcrumbs, which become meatballs . . . and then when the breadcrumbs are stale you feed them to the birds . . . but you never, ever throw it out. Too holy to be discarded, bread in Hannah’s family is endlessly transformed into other forms of sustenance. At first glance, the semiotic power of the present-day slice of bread, temporally and spatially removed from camp rations, cannot compete with the evocative potential of Michelle’s authentic spoon. However, as Hannah reflexively asserts, the practice of eating their daily pieces of bread allows survivors to ritually reenact the moment when they ate “that piece of bread.” Thus recalling Seremetakis’ (1994) eloquent account of the nostalgic act of eating a peach that did or did not taste like the peach of her youth, the commensal act of eating bread forever incarnates the sensuous memory of life-threatening hunger and miraculous survival. In contrast to the spoon, potentially every plate of food or every slice of bread associatively transmits descendants to the death-world and in the process reembodies and reembeds scenarios of survival and genociderelated meaning-worlds. In this way, survivors perpetually consume the Holocaust past and are consumed by it (Stoller 1997). Although beyond the scope of this paper, survivor silent practices were presented by descendants as embedding bodily sensations and emotive responses that reenacted and made 15 present the dangers of the death-world and their own miraculous survival. Thus, in keeping with practice theory (Bourdieu 1977), survivor practices become the means of selfreproduction and the perpetual re-presentation of the foreboding past. Although the descendant experienced these practices as part of their tacit, taken-for-granted life-world, these practices nevertheless encapsulated fragmentary information regarding the physical/emotional conditions of life in a deathworld and the strategic actions required to survive. As Billig explains, although practices are often silently performed, one need not be able to “explicitly articulate” observed practices or know why they are performed. “Responsive involvement” with those performing a practice is sufficient to allow the observer to “gain a nuanced and practical understanding of a quite remarkable kind of what is displayed or carried in the specific variability of . . . activities” (Billig et al. 1988, 23). Therefore, first-generation practices, or “narratives in motion,” “displayed or carried” strategic scenarios of survival in and meaningful commentary on a world where such practices were essential. The child, “responsively involved” with parental practice—for example, at the dinner table, when cold, or when sick—can in this way “tacitly and practically understand” that one must eat well, avoid danger, and remain healthy. Although these practices are reflexively recalled by most descendants as “eccentric,” they are nevertheless claimed to be strategically effective behavior in the face of, as one descendant termed it, “what survivor families know to be a hostile and dangerous world.” However, these practices are recalled as transmitting not only anxiety or pessimism but also what descendants claimed was part of “the survivor’s gift of life.” As in the case of Beth’s intimate interaction with her father and Michelle’s account of her mother’s choice to keep the spoon in their home, descendants point to the empowering and vivifying force of genocide legacies. Discussion Contrary to reductionist readings of survivor family silence as a marker of absence, hegemonic silencing, pathology, or the unspeakability of genocide, descendant accounts depict the dynamic, normative, and self-imposed silent presence of the Holocaust death-world interwoven with everyday life. The interview, as a site of self-narration, allows descendants to transform previously tacit knowledge of the surviving traces of the past into explicit text. Although initially resistant to narrative, these traces form an experiential matrix ranging from silent interaction with surviving embodied artifacts and freestanding memento mori to practices of survival as they concertedly make the past present. In this way, silence may be seen as a powerful and effective conduit of memory, maintaining the imminent presence of the past in the present. If the matrix of silent Holocaust presence in the private domain has been carried over via objects, practices, the visceral body, and emotions and then silently transmitted to a descendant via silent object-person relations, empathic person-person re- 16 lations, and learned practices, then the matrix has enabled the normative copresence of the Holocaust past alongside and interwoven with the descendant’s present everyday life-world. If the Holocaust past is forever silently interwoven with the intimate sites of domestic memory, then we cannot refer to survivor family experience as the presence of absence; it must be described instead as the copresence of the Holocaust in everyday life. If, for the descendant, the tattooed arm is one’s father’s arm, if hearing cries at night is how one sleeps, and if the spoon from Auschwitz holds one’s morning oatmeal, then one cannot disentangle the mundane life-world as one knows it from the interwoven copresence of the Holocaust past. We must ask, then, whether the frames of Holocaust scholarship have unintentionally silenced and absenced this kind of silent copresence. Although domestic Holocaust silence is, in fact, the “forbearance of speech” (Merriam-Webster 2004), the resultant loss of words need not signal psychologically maladaptive repression of the past, the failure of interpersonal interaction, or ultimate forgetting and absence. Instead, the network of media of domestic silence appears to constitute an alternative, nonverbal route through which the emotive and corporeal experience (rather than the recollected cognitive narrative) of the past may be transmitted/communicated and thus made actively present and lived in daily interaction. These findings therefore provide an ethnographic case study of the process and practices of what Halbwachs (1980) and Nora (1989) referred to as “lived memory.” With the help of this lived and intimate presence of the Holocaust past, survivor families may avoid the historicity and forgetting entailed in public forms of commemoration. However, is silent memory work capable of transmitting intergenerational knowledge of the past and constituting a commemorative legacy? Could silent person-object and person-person interactions be conceptualized as alternative media of communication/transmission of the past to descendants? Ruth Wajnryb (2001) asserts that, although silent, intergenerational interaction between survivors and their children may be considered a form of communication. Wajnryb explains that survivor-family interaction involves communication of a system of signs transmitted from parent to child that constitute shared meaning. Lyotard and Larochelle (1992, 407–408) also call for a more flexible reading of “communication” as interactive meaning making. Language, they assert, is not essential for communication if by communication one implies understanding or empathy. Communication and transmission, as mechanical metaphors, erringly reduce the complex process of language to mechanical relations. Bateson (1982, 5–6), too, focuses on what he terms the mechanical “lineal two-unit model of learning and communication.” Learning takes place via multiple links or sequences of exchange that cannot be reduced to specific locations or moments of interaction. In applying these insights to nonverbal intergenerational communication, one clearly need not use language to achieve empathic relations and understanding, nor can the complex network of nonverbal interaction be Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 reduced to the narrow experience of “mechanical” linear transmission. The use of the metaphors of communication and transmission reduces the multifaceted field of our matrix of interaction to relations between two specific points of parent-child communication and reduces the multilayered and infinite process of exposure to and learning about the Holocaust past to one finite link between those two points. It also assumes that the exchange of information reaches completion upon the “transmission” of one limited message from one point to the other, once the recipient of a message has “absorb[ed] it all” (Bateson 1982, 5). In contrast, the network of media of Holocaust presence provides multiple and perpetual points of interaction or “links of exchange” between and around the parent and child that are not controlled by the parties involved; their effects cannot be predicted, nor does the process of “learning” ever reach completion. If parent-child interaction in the home allowed for the silent presence and lived experience of the past and the silent interactive exchange of information regarding the Holocaust life-/death-world, then do descendants have “knowledge” of the Holocaust past that could be imparted to a researcher, their children, or the collective? As seen above, respondents insisted at the outset of the interviews that they could not tell me much because they did not have knowledge regarding the past. It was only as their narratives progressed and they proceeded to articulate the presence of the Holocaust past in the survivor home that the taken-for-granted presence could be storied, narrativized, shared, and potentially historicized. How, then, are we to understand descendant “knowledge” that is and is not knowledge of the Holocaust, knowledge that effaces itself as potential testimony while nonetheless embedding a rich network of Holocaust-related experience, interaction, and learning? Recall Eve’s claim that she did not know why her mother screamed at night, although she “knew that it was about what [she] did not know.” What can be said about our evidence of the descendant’s experiential knowledge of the matrix of presence of a past that they themselves claim they could not know? Holocaust scholars and “philosophers of genocide” would insist that there can be no knowledge of the Holocaust because it is an event at the limits that remains “in the excess of our frames of reference . . . and cannot be assimilated into full cognition” (Felman 1992, 5). The content of survivor silence will forever be unknowable as long as “one cannot die in his or her place” (Perrin 2004, 142). In accordance with Derrida’s (1976, 107) rejection of “ontotheoteleology,” or an extralinguistic presence, Eve could not have any knowledge of the content of the silence she could not know beyond her minimal inference that her mother’s screams signify the Holocaust. Are her mother’s screams thus a negative ontology (Gergen 1994, 34) or a negative sign signifying the absence of knowledge? Once again, forms of knowledge appear to be at work in the survivor home that are not conditional on commensurable existential experience or verbalized historical knowledge. These alternative forms might allow for a nonpositivistic form Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence of “knowing” the Other’s experience and the possibility of participatory experience. But what knowledge emerges from the interaction? According to Fox-Keller (in Josselson 1995), Platonic knowledge, as compared to Baconian knowledge, is based on eros, union, and love. This union enables empathy to create a “potential space in which the boundaries between self as knower and Other as known are relaxed” (Winnicott in Josselson 1995, 31). In this space, “aspects of the known are allowed to permeate the knower.” Assuming that in this space, the self and the Other “share participation in a matrix of signification” (Josselson 1995, 31), the self may access an internal array of the Other’s experience, allowing empathic knowledge to emerge. Thus, if the child interacts empathically with the parent and shares participation in everyday, taken-for-granted, Holocaust life-/death-world signification, the survivor “may be made present and known” to the child (Buber in Josselson 1995, 31). Over time, mutual coordinated interaction (Gergen 1994, 33) engenders a local ontology of relationship where shared meaning emerges. Meaning and knowledge need not be exclusively conditional on words as such, for they only “generate meaning by virtue of their place within the realm of human interaction.” Meaning is constituted by “communality” rather than “textuality” (Gergen 1994). In this way, one might say that through her repeated mundane “mutual coordinated interactional” practices of placing her head under her pillow and waking her father to wake her screaming mother, Eve came to empathically know the meaning of her mother’s nightly attacks. Their wordless relationship could still engender an empathic and communal form of knowledge of the past without Eve’s having experienced or even having been told the historical narrative of the founding event. She could, in fact, “know” why her mother screamed without historical Holocaust knowledge. McHugh’s (1968) definition of personal knowledge extends descendant empathic knowledge of the past to actual “personal knowledge.” McHugh asserts that one has personal knowledge of another’s most “private experience” without experiencing the event because when “defining a situation” we need only know what is felt by the Other and not actually experience the feeling. When taking the place of the Other, we need only know what he/she “makes of his place.” What the Other makes of his place and his feelings are accessible to the observer because feelings “are not private property . . . they are performances . . . public and observable” (1968, 134). Having observed his/her parents’ performance of feelings and what they “make of their place” on the border of the life- and death-worlds, the descendant defines the situation toward “personal knowledge” of the survivor experience. If we acknowledge the descendant’s empathic or personal knowledge of his/her parents’ postwar experience of their past and even their feelings regarding the copresence of that past in the family present, how may we explain their disavowal of knowledge? Polanyi (1958, 88) proposes that personal knowl- 17 edge entails tacit knowledge that either cannot be “adequately spoken” or has yet to be articulated. For one unable to explicitly voice distinct ideas, tacit knowledge is expressed in the “instrumental particulars” of daily life. “We know many more things than we can tell, knowing them only in practice as instrumental particulars and not as objects. The knowledge of such particulars is therefore ineffable” (p. 88) until we reflexively narrate our experience. Despite this ineffability, a matrix of signs may still convey or signify this knowledge, which may then be shared.21 Before self-narration of their childhood, of “instrumental particular” Holocaust-related practices signified and shared in the private sphere, descendants have only tacit knowledge of the presence of the past. They know only that events routinely occur that signify experiences that they do not know about, although their own life-worlds are saturated with the instrumental practices that together constitute that knowledge. If, according to MerleauPonty, all perception embeds and is qualified by a world— by a disposition and orientation (Merleau-Ponty in Young 1987, 1)—then descendants’ perception of their world is clearly qualified by the orientation that they do not have effable knowledge of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, when I reworded my questions to inquire about the presence of the past, rather than recount their knowledge of the past, descendants recounted the countless semiotic and instrumental anchors with which they defined the situation of the copresence of the past, empathically took the place of the Other, and acquired silent personal and tacit knowledge of the parental past. They described their lived experience of the matrix of shared Holocaust signification in the silent survivor home. This case study raises various methodological dilemmas and theoretical implications. If researchers are to undertake ethnographies of silence, how are they to approach the difficult task of ethnographic work without words or narrative to act as the familiar conduits with which we elicit and record subjective accounts of lived experience or validate our participant observations? Are respondents’ retrospective accounts of embodied memory, bodily practices, and person-object interaction valid ethnographic “evidence” of silent life-worlds and the presence of the past? Is it sufficient to claim that these accounts are phenomenologically true, or are they mere representations of what is already the problematic realm of “distorted memory” (Schudson 1995)? Although the solution may lie in traditional methods of microanthropological participant observation in the everyday lives of our subjects, two key problems arise. First, not only do we risk returning to the “sins of the fathers” and the objectification of our subjects, but despite contemporary exercises in disciplinary reflexivity, 21. In a similar vein, Merleau-Ponty describes prereflective knowledge as consciousness turned out on the world and available to be read by others. We know ourselves “in our actions and interactions . . . there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xi, in Butt and Langdridge 2003, 479). The survivor home and its silent matrix may be seen as the externalized selves of the survivor and the descendant. 18 our “moral visions” (Hayden 2007) of the healthy, vocal, and politically liberated individual may wreak havoc with our observations and findings, reflecting our own worldviews rather than the lived experience of our subjects. Second and more specific to the general case study of silent memory work (and perhaps less so to a study of embodied practice), all would agree that, ideally, the ethnographer would wish to be present at the constitutive event at the inception of memory, with Eve when she covers her head with her pillow. However, when exploring silent memory work as process, as the evolution of lived experience from tacit embodiment to empathic communication and finally to the constitution of subjectivity as mediated by reflexive recollections of the imprints of the time on emergent selfhood, it is precisely the nascent attempts to articulate tacit knowledge that become essential. The effect of experience and discourse in the temporal gap between event and representation (as seen in the case of Emma’s shoes) need not merely be seen as “noise”; instead, once accounted for, it should be seen as opening up new focal points in the research endeavor. Finally, although microanthropology has traditionally explored mundane lived experience, the mundane experience of culturally sanctified experience (be it ideologically, religiously, or morally loaded) has been ignored in favor of the examination of the way culture publicly structures and celebrates the sacred as distinct from the mundane. A return to the micro sites of silent everyday experience without retrospective narrative accounts that might give voice to the banality of experience—experience that would otherwise be culturally sanctified—would serve only to sustain Cartesian dichotomies and not to consider the more complex dialectic between the mundane/sacred and the private/public. The case study also raises numerous theoretical and practical implications. As mental health professionals work with trauma survivors and descendants around the globe and agents of memory establish museums and community centers introducing Western forms of commemoration and testimonial projects in war-torn countries aiming to liberate traumatized and silenced voices, the above findings point to the importance of culture-sensitive definitions of illness, healing, silence, and memory work. Echoing Ian Hacking’s (1995) critique of the proliferation of psychological illness constructs, scholars might be wary of “making up people,” pathologizing and collectively enlisting silent survivor families rather than exploring alternative or supplementary forms of private, silent, and nonpathological forms of interaction and commemoration. Comparative studies of silent genocide victims and descendants are called for so that lessons learned from culturally diverse forms of re-presentation and recollection of difficult pasts may serve to sensitize those who seek to interpret, heal, historicize, and liberate silent voices of genocide.22 If this case study sheds light on diverse and complex processes of silent memory work in everyday life, then we might 22. See McKinney (2007) and Kidron (forthcoming). Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 call on memory studies to turn their attention away from Nora’s (1989) “dead memory” of public commemoration to the more subtle and intimate processes of what Halbwachs (1980) conceptualized as “lived memory” interwoven with the social milieu of mundane experience. Although the foundational concepts of dead and lived memory were coined decades ago, there have been few attempts to observe nonmonumental memory work or to record ethnographic accounts of how lived memories emerge, function, or change over time. Are the processes of personal private memory of no interest if they do not allow us to align ourselves on the left or right of hegemonic or revisionist readings of history or to contribute to the moral crusades (Hayden 2007) of public agents of traumatic genocidal memory? In the process of exploring private memory work, we have also discovered what might be termed the “normalization” of traces of death-worlds interwoven (and not repressed or silenced) with everyday life-worlds. Not merely present on the surface of daily interaction, the tattooed number, the shoes, and the soup spoon are experienced as living reminders of the enigmatic power of survival and human resilience rather than merely eliciting emotive distress, mourning, or morbidity in the descendant generation. Because these traces have become seamlessly intertwined in what descendants take for granted as their ontological experience of “the way life is,” this case study calls on us to problematize scholarly readings of the sequestration of death in everyday Western life. Aiming to deconstruct one more dichotomy—that of life/death—we might further explore the way in which the embodied, practiced, and materially objectified past enables subjects to fluidly move into and out of past death-worlds and chronotopes with or without “historical memory.” Although this case study and discussion have focused on trauma-related memory work, the silent mnemonic practices and processes depicted here may present a tentative model of nontraumatic lived memory work. Families that have not experienced genocidal suffering nonetheless experience parallel mechanisms of silent memory work. The matrix of signification, entailing interaction with embodied objects, silent parent-child interaction, person-object interaction, and finally transmitted survival practices, may be isolated and charted in the experience of nonsurvivor families. Although events surrounding separation, loss, and death may have unfolded more “naturally” in nonsurvivor family life, scholars might explore the way the longed-for past, loved ones, and memories of the dead and dying remain interwoven in everyday life. In accordance with Bertaux and Thompson’s (1993) critique of the absence of research on nonpathological forms of familial transmission and remembering, the proposed model of silent familial memory work presents a tentative blueprint of nonpathological forms of intergenerational transmission. Although differing, perhaps, in emotive intensity from traumatic memory, nontraumatic familial memory and the intergenerational “communication” and “transmission” of that memory may also be similarly embedded in tacit forms of parent- Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence child and person-object interaction. A better understanding of these silent familial mechanisms will potentially shed light on the function of mnemonic legacies in the phenomenological constitution of subjectivity.23 To return full circle to our opening critique of logocentric paradigms of silence, this study of the silent presence of the Holocaust past has consistently pointed to the gap between academic discourse on the “absent” traumatic past on the one hand and the everyday lay experience of the presence of the past on the other. We may then ask, What is it about the nature of academic paradigmatic frames that causes us, despite the great pride we take in reflexivity, to cut out of our frames such fundamental aspects of everyday life-worlds and to perceive predominantly reductionist formulaic behavior rather than allowing for the diversity we claim to exist? In this case of trauma-related silence, does the answer lie in the politics of genocidal memory and the symbolic and sociopolitical capital of agents of memory invested in their discursive formations? Despite postmodern deconstruction of Cartesian dichotomies, lingering Western logocentric conceptions of silence and speech and of absence and presence appear to blind us to the rich world that lies between these two poles, between silence and speech, between absence and presence. Acknowledgements I would like to sincerely thank Benjamin Orlove and the anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful comments, which greatly enriched the paper. I would also like to thank Paul Antze, Michael Lambek, Allan Young, and Laurence Kirmayer for our fruitful dialogues in the early stages of drafting the manuscript. I am indebted to Don Handelman as a constant source of insight. I recall Tania Forte (may she rest in peace), who encouraged me to explore the magic of material culture. I thank Giora Kidron for our stimulating discussions and his editorial eye. I am grateful to the Halbert Exchange Program, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services, and the Morris Ginsberg Foundation for the funding toward my postdoctoral research in Montreal and Toronto in 2005–2006. I most heartfully thank the descendants for allowing me to share in their memories. 23. This and other ethnographies of individual silent memory work may contribute to psychological anthropology’s concern for the inner subjective experience bracketed, at least temporarily, from pathologizing psychological and biomedical concepts. 19 Comments Robert M. Hayden Department of Anthropology and Center for Russian and East European Studies, 4419 W. W. Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, U.S.A. (rhayden@pitt.edu) 17 X 08 Carol Kidron makes a highly original and very important contribution by seeing silence about severe trauma as a matrix for communication of nonpathological knowledge of traumatic events, rather than as a manifestation of repression to be overcome. The analysis is the more powerful because it may be generalizable beyond the specifics of Israelis and the Holocaust. Kidron’s depiction of parents using silence to transmit nonpathological knowledge of traumatic events struck me especially forcefully because it suddenly let me understand elements of the lives of people in the former Yugoslavia whom I have known for many years. What is not well understood about the former Yugoslavia is that the terrible events of the 1990s were lesser versions of the horrors perpetrated there from 1941 to 1945, “lesser” in terms of the numbers of casualties and the sheer cruelty and brutality of the murders and tortures inflicted during the earlier period (see Dulić 2005, Hayden 2008). In the 1940s, the most numerous victims were Serbs in the so-called Independent State of Croatia, of whom one-third were to be killed, one-third expelled, and one-third converted to Catholicism; this was state policy. Jews were, of course, to be exterminated, as were Gypsies (Roma); these two groups suffered proportionately heavier casualties, but far more Serbs were killed. This is no more “ancient history” than the Holocaust; both are events in the memory of those who lived through them. Kidron helps me understand the reticence in the 1980s of some Serbs from Croatia about what had happened to their families there in 1941–45. Over the course of years, I came to know the outlines of stories of those whose parents had seen their family members raped, tortured, and murdered and their homes burned. Some of the children of the survivors had the stories in fragments, because their parents, like those of Kidron’s informants, had not often or willingly told them much about them. Within the context of socialist Yugoslavia, this silence could have had a political dimension, because the Communists, victorious over Croat, Serb, Bosnian Muslim, and Slovene nationalist and fascist forces, as well as the Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians who had partitioned and occupied the country, commemorated the war dead generically as “victims of war and fascism.” In a country based on an official ideology of “brotherhood and unity,” commemorating the specifics of murders and tortures by former and even present neighbors was seen as too risky. 20 But it is the personal dimension that is more relevant to Kidron’s argument. Through their only rarely broken silences about the horrors they lived through, the parents of my friends exemplified how their own lives were defined not by their sufferings or even by surviving them but by building new lives rather than constantly living in the horrors of the past (the spoon-from-Auschwitz story related by Kidron is remarkable in this regard). Even after war came to Yugoslavia in 1991 and the memories were revived (I wrote at the time that the past was being remembered in order to repeat it [Hayden 1994, 1995]), the people who grew up with the kind of nonpathological, embodied presence of the past dealt best with the reappearance of many of the same configurations of opposition and the explicit invocations of the horrors of the past that were made to provoke atrocities in the present. Yet if silent transmission of information about pathologies can help induce nonpathological knowledge of them, then the reverse may also be true: dwelling on pathologies may produce pathological knowledge, even hatred. There is evidence from psychology that genocide accusations not only increase hostility against the accused group but also increase the aggressiveness of the group on whose behalf the claim is made (Wohl and Branscombe 2004). Tzvetan Todorov (2003) has argued that claims of being the victims of genocide are better viewed as political tactics aimed at getting present-day advantage than as commemorations of past victims. As the wars began in Yugoslavia, Bette Denich (1994) and I (Hayden 1994) argued that highly publicized Serbian claims of having been victims of genocide in the 1940s were politically motivated, even though, as discussed above, they were largely true. The point was to drive people to enact the pathologies of war by recalling vividly and explicitly the pathologies that members of their groups had suffered. By showing that survivor parents’ silence about the Holocaust transferred nonpathological knowledge of it to their children, Kidron is challenging not only established schools in psychology but also, implicitly, the justification for using graphic and personalized accounts of suffering to “commemorate” the victims of genocide. If the parents of her informants were right, dwelling on pathology is inherently unhealthy. This is a view that may not be popular with all who are involved in commemorating victims of mass killings. Kidron’s article is thus a brave one, a highly original approach that offers a powerful challenge to established wisdom and to established political interests. In short, it is the best kind of scholarship. Michael Lambek Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, 19 Russell Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S2, Canada (lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca). 13 X 08 This paper addresses issues that are at once perceived in the public realm as grave and consequential and by scholars as highly complex and difficult to resolve. Is the experience of Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 events that are ethically “unspeakable” literally so? Are the consequences of suffering the unspeakable necessarily pathological, and is such psychopathology inevitably visited on the next generation? When is pathology the correct or appropriate modality for describing the effects of violence and for remembering and, in effect, legitimating the truth of the cause, and when is it to be interpreted with suspicion as a form of moralizing? Although she continues to use the word “trauma,” Kidron is courageous and, in my view, correct to suggest the superficiality, the incorrectness, and even possibly the harm of much (but not necessarily all) trauma discourse.24 These large ontological and epistemological questions frame the more immediate concerns of anthropologists. A critical problem for ethnographers is how to document and understand silence. Are we professionally too readily inclined to push our informants into putting things into words? Are we obsessed with turning their private and sometimes inchoate feelings into analytic discourse or symbolic interpretation? The strength and persuasiveness of Kidron’s account lie in her ability to resist these tendencies and to recognize silence positively, as itself a kind of voice rather than a kind of repression.25 Kidron effectively triangulates between the time of the interview, the time of her informant’s childhood, and the time of the parent’s original violation and internment. What does it mean to remember the events of ones parents’ lives, and to what extent do their experiences become our own? Wittgenstein asks how we know another’s pain. We do as young children recognize our parents’ pain through their under- or overresponsiveness, their withdrawal, or their excess of affect. As the child becomes herself against, or in the context of, the parents’ acts and affects, so the nightly screams become an internal terror and the oatmeal spoon a part of everyday life. We know “that” or “how” our parents suffer (and are sane) because we, too, are suffering (and sane). Knowing “that” or knowing “how” is more basic and more salient than knowing “why” they suffer, an explanation that can only come from placing the private experience within the public narratives encountered in school and elsewhere. Moreover, to know our parents’ suffering and their sanity in its intimate particularity is not to know “the Holocaust” in its immensity but to dispense with such reified abstractions. What would or could it mean to say “I know the Holocaust”? Kidron rightly begins by taking the her informants’ cue to abandon questions of knowledge in favor of simply seeking evidence of its presence. But in the end, is she still captivated by the idea or the ideal that there is a single thing (or event) out there to know? In her attention to the everyday materializations of affect, 24. For a range of perspectives on these issues, see the forthcoming collection edited by philosophers Kristen Brown and Bettina Bergo (2009). 25. A further step is to ask when silence is the product or manifestation of a “language ideology” that values silence for itself. Perhaps Kidron does not pursue this because silence does not have this value in the Israeli context. Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence Kidron joins scholars like Das (2007), Steedman (1987), and Young (1996, 2006), who write powerfully about violence and abjection. Perhaps more squarely, Kidron depathologizes the survivor past. The shocking moral for those who would like to use narratives of survivor suffering for political ends is that socialization in these families may not be so different from that in others. Parents are always a partial mystery to their children, and their lives before one’s birth is somehow unimaginable or, rather, dependent on imagination. Whether we take the opacity in childhood of our parents’ lives, loves and losses, successes and defeats as an “affecting absence” or as “salient silence” surely depends on many factors, including both internal family psychodynamics and the ways in which the private world is transfigured in public narratives that urge interpretation along particular lines. Kidron argues that memory and silence need not be inherently political. As she says, “By conceiving of survivor silence solely as politically and ideologically loaded absence, ethnography [and not only ethnography] fails to seek [or to perceive] phenomenological accounts of the silent presence of the past.” I am persuaded by this.26 Yet I must also inquire about the relationship between the attention within Israel to memories (whether publicly noisy or privately silent) of events that took place in the past and the relative inattention to (refusal or inability to acknowledge) Palestinian suffering that takes place right now. The way to honor victims of the Holocaust might include compassion, empathy, and a principled decision never to humiliate an enemy or to place anyone within walled enclosures. A lesson of Kidron’s paper might also be to acknowledge and respect the nonpolitical no less than the political dimensions of the grief of others. Nissim Mizrachi Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, P.O.B. 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel (nissimm@post .tau.ac.il). 23 X 08 In the introduction to the special issue of Ethos entitled “Histories and Subjectivities,” Geoffrey White, the guest editor, outlines the collection’s theme by drawing attention to a relatively neglected area in the study of memory, the “connections between personal memory, narrative practices, and larger social and political formations” (White 2001, 494). In line with this new direction of inquiry, Carol Kidron’s insightful and stimulating paper sheds new light on the transmission of traumatic memory by Holocaust survivors to their children. Contrary to the prevailing discourse in Israel, survivor descendents consciously refuse to turn their private memories into public testimonies. Kidron’s pragmatic ap26. I have myself conceived remembering in the key of ethics rather than politics (e.g., Lambek 1996, 2002). 21 proach traces these silent forms of memory work in everyday life within the familial domain. The discrepancy between her findings and the prevailing academic discourse provides Kidron with a point of departure for her original analysis. The crux of the matter lies in the epistemological divide between current academic discourse and Kidron’s pragmatic theoretical approach. In that discourse, silence is fueled by the hermeneutics of suspicion, to use Paul Ricoeur’s term (Holub 2005, 281), and is regarded solely as a surface phenomenon signifying a concealed, essential reality to be penetrated. In contrast, Kidron considers silence an appropriate cultural option, available to survivor descendents during their daily “sense making” of the traces of their parents’ past. She therefore prefers to turn her incisive ethnographic gaze toward her silent subjects and to propose a thorough reading of memory transmission and enactment through bodily, spatial, and daily behavioral practices within the domestic and familial domain. Nevertheless, as to the hermeneutic pendulum swinging between “histories” and “subjectivities,” Kildron’s analysis seems a bit weighted toward “subjectivity.” More precisely, “history” and context are underrepresented in Kidron’s account of the subjects’ lived experience, which therefore remains somewhat incomplete and context free. Many of the reported practices appear as her subjects’ isolated individual responses to memory traces of their parents’ horrific experience, while little attention is paid to the broader collective meaning of the Holocaust for the descendents. To be sure, in widening the context one should not abandon the subjects’ lived experience. On the contrary, one would anticipate that for descendents, mostly middle-aged individuals raised on Israel’s canonic national narrative of “from the Holocaust to heroism,” the broader meaning of the Holocaust would permeate sense-making processes in the private sphere.27 In addition, if silent and verbal forms of memory work are both cultural options, a fuller picture of the informants’ life and context would provide us with a better understanding of the conditions under which individuals choose between these two forms of memory work for their cultural repertoire. Another aspect of the immediate context is the empirical methods used. The memory practices under investigation were not observed directly by the ethnographer. In fact, the quotes representing memory work had gone through double screening and double narration, once by the informant and later by the ethnographer, herself the child of Holocaust survivors. Whereas Kidron is aware of the mediated nature of her data, her analysis takes reported events at face value. A more critical approach to the narration processes and “filters” through which the tales of silence were shaped might have cast further light on the subject matter. For instance, consid27. For an ethnographic study of the dialectic conducted between the public and the private sphere in the practice of memory work, see Goodman and Mizrachi (2008). 22 ering the interviews as ethnographic events in themselves, during which middle-aged informants retrospectively selected and restored their stories, could have added another dimension to the analysis of silence as a cultural strategy for memory work. Whereas some of these concerns reflect the broader theoretical dilemmas lying in the open space between histories and subjectivities and others are related to methodological considerations and limitations, Kidron’s major contribution lies in her very insightful theoretical stance. By turning the direction of inquiry away from top-down grand historical, moralistic, and psychologically deep-structured approaches fueled by the hermeneutics of suspicion and toward the individual’s actual practice of memory work, she has opened up a whole new space for ethnographic research. In offering a new, pragmatic reading of silence as a form of memory work, she has managed to untangle the conceptual knot that had flattened the subject and moved analysis away from individual lived experience. Carol Kidron’s article is a worthy contribution to the growing pragmatic turn in sociology28 and cultural anthropology and to the study of the Holocaust in particular. Barbara Rylko-Bauer Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, 2825 East Fulton, Grand Rapids, MI 49506, U.S.A. (basiarylko@juno.com). 23 X 08 Carol Kidron provides an intriguing and complex exploration of silence as a mode of transmission of Holocaust memory within the home of Holocaust survivors. In examining varied forms and meanings of silence, she highlights alternative ways in which survivors pass on their Holocaust experience to their children without directly narrating their past. She correctly notes that silence does not, a priori, denote avoidance, erasure, or pathological repression and can, in fact, be an intimate, nonpathological way of dealing with a horrific past. Nor is it the case, automatically, that descendants of Holocaust survivors suffer effects of transmitted trauma. As her research demonstrates, these are issues to be studied and not assumed. Kidron begins her article with a wonderful example of how ethnographic research can provide new understandings of whatever social phenomena we are studying. In this particular case, an interviewee named Eve claimed to not know anything about her parent’s Holocaust past, because they had never talked about it, but then went on to note that “the Holocaust was present in my home.” It is these “nonverbal and partially verbal traces of the Holocaust interwoven in everyday life” that Kidron examines in her article. The excerpts from Kidron’s interviews with descendants of survivors are powerful, enlightening, and at times very moving. They made me wish for even more in this “ethnography 28. See, for example, Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny (2001). Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 of silence.” I wondered about parent-child relationships and familial contexts when reading some of the narrative excerpts, especially since “lived memory” was a key aspect of her analysis. Her discussion of three descendants’ responses to the presence of tattooed numbers on a parent’s arm was fascinating, but I also wondered how many of her 55 respondents mentioned this specific, very visible reminder of their parents’ past; not everyone who went through concentration camps was branded this way. I felt at times that the ethnography was in danger of being swamped by the theorizing and deconstruction. Of course, Kidron needed to embed her work within relevant academic contexts (general and Holocaust-specific studies of trauma, memory, and silence), which she does quite thoroughly. I also appreciate her close reading of how silence and “presence” worked in the daily lives of her interviewees, but I would have liked to see more balance and further presentation of Kidron’s undoubtedly rich interview material. There is also opportunity, with these data, for even further exploration of the normalization of emotions, artifacts, embodied objects, and habitual practices within descendants’ life stories. This is a powerful link to the past, for normalization is a theme in many Holocaust accounts: both the normalization of violence and dehumanization that was a hallmark of Nazi practice and the efforts on the part of prisoners to normalize mundane aspects of life as a survival strategy in the face of the grotesquely abnormal world of concentration and slave labor camps, ghettos, and death marches. A series of questions came to mind in reading the article, among them: What were the specifics of Kidron’s methodology? How did the Israeli historical and cultural context shape how Holocaust survivors dealt with their traumatic past? Would her findings be different if she sampled U.S.based Jews? I was surprised to find answers to these questions set apart from the article, in a series of supplements. It was informative (supplement A) to see the various ways in which silence has been conceptualized, across disciplines, as absence of speech, rather than as a unique entity of potentially equal relevance and meaning. However, the abovementioned issues (methods and cultural context) should have been succinctly integrated into the body of the article, for they are central to understanding Kidron’s research and findings, not supplemental. For example, it was important to know that Kidron, as a descendant of Auschwitz survivors, connected with her interviewees in ways that someone without this history might not have been able to. As she notes in supplement B, “upon hearing a tale of ‘silent presence,’ I would often share one of my own tales, which in turn often triggered more tales . . . . Thus, for both the respondent and myself as the ethnographer, the interview process became a . . . process of joint rediscovery.” This is a key methodological point that brings to mind Barbara Myerhoff’s concept of “a third voice,” the voice of collaboration (Kaminsky 1992, 7). Finally, Kidron suggests that the tendency to frame genocide studies in moral and political terms has contributed to Kidron Toward an Ethnography of Silence the paucity of “phenomenological accounts of the silent presence of the past” and argues for the validity of micro analyses of memory: “not all memory work hinges equally on power relations and empowerment.” It is, of course, possible to do both simultaneously. I would argue that part of our obligation, as anthropologists, is to ensure that the political—which in the real world of lived experience is all too often elided—be always somehow incorporated, regardless of the focus of our specific research. The suffering of those whose stories and experiences we tap into demands it. Reply When I set out to re-present an account of my findings on descendant experience, it was abundantly clear to me that contemporary discourse on genocide survivor families and preferential scholarly interest in macro commemorative processes would make it difficult to present a convincing case for a nonpathological form of silent Holocaust presence. Although I critically deconstructed epistemological readings of silence and of pathologized trauma descendants to bring attention to academic “blind spots” and pave the way for a wider field of vision, I hoped that the case for a bottom-up analysis of private memory could “carry its own” because it was grounded in descendants’ phenomenological accounts of the silent experience of micro familial memory work. Nevertheless, although none of the very thought-provoking comments took issue with my reading of the matrix of silent presence in survivor homes or with the implications of my findings regarding therapeutic intervention in survivor populations or enlistment in commemorative projects, two of the four commentators critiqued the ethical and methodological viability of an apolitical bottom-up exploration of Holocaust memory work “decontextualized” from Israeli sociopolitical reality and public discourse and practice. I begin from a point of consensus regarding silent memory work. As movingly depicted in Hayden’s account of silence in the former Yugoslavia, the choice not to voice one’s memories of suffering need not signal pathology, hegemonic silencing, or the absence of knowledge. Taking my argument one step farther, Hayden suggests that those who have experienced the silent presence of traces of the past may in fact have become more resilient to social suffering. Rather than merely legitimizing silent familial “commemoration” as a valid and perhaps even healthy alternative to vocal public memory, Hayden’s point calls for further analysis of the constitutive role of childhood exposure (and the exposure of entire populations) to the lived material, emotive, and embodied presence of the past. One might ask whether parentchild empathic encounters sensitize descendants to human suffering, to their own community’s loss, and, perhaps, to what Lambek refers to as “compassion” for the Other. Have 23 person-object relations with the spoon or with photos of murdered relatives familiarized descendants with death-worlds in some way that prepares them differentially for future chaos and loss? Beyond issues of normality, compassion, or increased resilience, I propose that for those whose only familiar ontological life-world entails the taken-for-granted movement between the living present and the embedded remnants of death, their experience of shared suffering and even linear time itself must deviate from that of those untouched by death (Meisenhelder 1979). Rather than seeking the symptomatology of PTSD, further study might examine the microcultural dynamics at play in these interwoven life-/death-worlds and the selves they engender. If memory work is critical in the phenomenological process of constituting selves (Lambek and Antze 1996), then beyond the top-down hegemonic construction of paranoid/militant subjectivities and public dissemination of mnemonic technologies of self (Goodman and Mizrachi 2008), it is critical that we understand the way lived memory of violent pasts has engendered a “genocide self,” not, as Lambek warns, as a reified carrier of private or public Holocaust knowledge but as a living and breathing mode of being. Strikingly echoing the critique of my more recent Cambodian-Canadian descendant respondents (Kidron, forthcoming), Hayden also problematizes the effect of testimony, suggesting that it is precisely the public recruitment of previously silent memory in oral-history projects or truth tribunals that risks inciting renewed conflict. As typologies of collective memory have shown, public commemoration of genocide serves to honor the collective dead by sustaining their presence among the living while instrumentalizing the past to serve political ends. Because, as I would hope my case study has shown, families silently sustain the copresence of the living and the dead in the familial life-world, this leaves us with the highly problematic contribution of monumental commemorative projects, namely, the bolstering of national political interests or no less politicized sectarian moral lessons. Concerning the therapeutic benefits of personal or collective testimony as the working through of the genocide past, even activists and mental health professionals like Rousseau, Morales, and Foxen (2001) question whether Western-Eurocentric psychosocial or political intervention “fragilizes” a community’s link to culturally grounded tools of healing and remembrance and whether victims only strategically (and temporarily) adopt trauma-related technologies of self in order to meet pressing material needs. As they note, in the absence of longitudinal ethnographic research on the lived experience of suffering and its aftermath, neither scholars nor activists can gauge the efficacy or danger of intervention. Despite the commentators’ interest in the silent presence of the past and implications for intervention, both Mizrachi and Rylko-Bauer raise methodological questions. Although I agree with their contention that it would be fascinating to observe the silent presence of the past in situ in the family life-world, it is surprising that the validity of descendant ac- 24 counts should be suspect, considering that the crisis of representation remains an inherent and endlessly debated dilemma of all ethnographic research and narrative analysis. As asserted in the paper, my research objective was not to document the constitutive events in the descendant childhood nor to observe the construction process of the descendant self but rather to capture the way descendants narratively author their silent legacy and themselves as sensually and intersubjectively “knowing” that legacy. Observation alone risks falling back on our own moral and intellectual visions of passive, wounded, and silenced victims of hegemonies without the benefit of our subjects’ accounts of a far more complex lived experience. Regarding the problem of sociohistorical contextualization, an account of the evolving Israeli sociopolitical context and Holocaust discourse and practice was presented, for lack of space, in supplement C (including reference to AmericanJewish contexts). As for the constitutive role of discourse on the descendant self, it is precisely the gap that opens up between events and the framing of retrospective accounts of those events that enables future sociological readings of the effect of discourse on identity that interests Mizrachi. Although it is beyond the scope of this study, my broader research project (Kidron 2005) did outline the political-ideological worldviews framing descendant accounts (i.e., humanist, nationalist, and religious) voiced in the more structured second half of the interview and compared the accounts of enlisted descendants to those of descendants who “resisted” public forms of commemoration. Although the expanded study allows for a sociological profile of descendant identity, the narrower study presented here provides a much-needed glimpse into the private realms of memory, while most importantly remaining methodologically loyal to the descendants’ narrative choice (and not the researcher’s choice) to narrate private intersubjective memory work, as distinct from the effect of public discourse work. To return full circle to the viability of an “apolitical” study of memory work, although we may be ethically obliged as individuals to take to the barricades, to heal or liberate human suffering, as ethnographers, our “moral vision” may well “impair our insight” (Hayden 2007). As Euro-Western discourses of hegemony and subjugation, human rights, victimhood, and trauma take on a moral register of universal truth, enlightenment, and progress (McKinney 2007), our personal and professional vision of what should be remembered and articulated, as well as how, where, and by whom, is in my view at odds with the ethnographic imperative of “sustained engagement” with our subjects “on their terms” (Jackson 2004, 54). Rather than taking it on ourselves to “redress the injustices of the world,” we might “do justice to the way others experience the world and what is at stake for them” (Jackson 2004, 54). Thus, despite Rylko-Bauer’s suggestion that we might reflexively “do both,” I fear that we may unwittingly allow paradigms and political agendas to define what is at Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 stake for “them” and risk absencing and silencing alternative experiences of the past. —Carol A. Kidron References Cited Adorno, T. [1949] 1975. 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