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Published April 5, 2004; Category: ARTS AND SCIENCES
A public conference titled "Contested Memories of the Holocaust" will take place Friday, April 9, and Saturday, April 10, at Dartmouth.
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Because most of the survivors of the Holocaust could not return to their native countries after World War II, many moved to Israel, the United States, Australia, Argentina, or other countries. Many were unable to talk about their experiences at first. Only years later did they find willing listeners and publishers interested in making their accounts available. Many survivors had to learn new languages and assimilate to new cultures, which affected the way they remembered and narrated their experiences.
"How the story got passed down was in many ways a factor of the places they went to. Memory is always in the present," said Marianne Hirsch, The Ted and Helen Geisel Professor in the Humanities. "What we're doing is to compare the cultural memories in Israel and the U.S. These are the two main destinations of Holocaust survivors.... We're interested in the question of the mediated, contextual and shifting nature of memory, and how over the last 60 years, memory has gotten simplified. It can get monolithic and appropriative. It can lose some of its nuances and complexity, but it also gains new dimensions as it is adopted by the second and now the third generation. The conference will explore the ethics of remembering, the problems of identification across ethnic lines, of comparison in a genocidal age, and other topics relating to holocaust memory in the 21st century."
The conference will take place over two days with six panel discussions and one keynote speaker each day. (Along with the conference, Dartmouth professors Marianne Hirsch and Annelise Orleck will teach an undergraduate seminar this term with two professors from Tel Aviv University.)
The keynote speakers are Amira Hass, a prize-winning journalist at Haaretz, a daily newspaper in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Grace Paley, a writer, poet and activist who lives in Thetford, Vt.
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Amira Hass will speak about "The Israeli Occupation: Why the Equations with the Holocaust?" She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (2000), about living in the Gaza Strip as a Jewish Israeli, before and after the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass is the child of Holocaust survivors. She studied history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. She held teaching positions and odd jobs before turning to editing at Haaretz in 1989, and later that year, covering the Romanian revolution. She now lives in Ramallah, where she moved in 1997. She reports on Palestinian efforts at self-government, the relationship between the Palestinian people and their government (the PNA), and the activities of Hamas and other dissident groups.
"In the end," she wrote in Drinking the Sea at Gaza, "my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel - democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve."
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Grace Paley will read from her own work, including a short story titled "Three Days and a Question." She was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1922 to Russian-Jewish parents, who had been anti-czarist revolutionaries before being exiled to Siberia in 1904, then immigrating to the United States in 1905. She studied at Hunter College and New York University. She now lives in Thetford, Vt., and New York City.
She is the author of three collections of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), as well as collections of poetry and short fiction. She taught creative writing and literature at Sarah Lawrence College for 18 years, and at several other colleges, most in New York City. She has also been a visiting professor at Dartmouth on several occasions.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966 and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970. She was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1988, she was designated by the New York legislature the first New York State Author. She is now the Vermont Poet Laureate.
She has devoted herself to anti-war, feminist and anti-nuclear causes. She is often described as a writer whose public identity is New Yorker, Jewish and activist. The Village Voice once wrote about her, "Grace Paley is to New York what William Faulkner is to Mississippi."
Both Hass and Paley have said that the experiences of their parents had important influences on their own work. Hass's parents are Holocaust survivors, and Paley's parents were political refugees.
The "Contested Memories of the Holocaust" conference includes panel discussions with experts from the United States and abroad, including Geoffrey Hartman (Yale), Susan Rubin Suleiman (Harvard), Bryan Cheyette (Brownstone Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, Dartmouth), Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and James Young (University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
The conference was organized by Hirsch and Annelise Orleck, Associate Professor of History, who will both participate in the discussions. Orleck was on the first commission to create a Holocaust memorial in New York City, which eventually resulted in the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, which opened in 1997; and Hirsch has published widely on what she has called Holocaust "postmemory" - the memory of the second generation. Both professors have interviewed Holocaust survivors in their research, although neither is an authority on Israeli culture. (Orleck specializes in women's and American history; Hirsch studies European literature and culture.)
The conference is sponsored by the Geisel Professorship (which Hirsch holds), the Jewish Studies Program, the Women's and Gender Studies Program, the Comparative Literature Program, the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth, the Dickey Center for International Understanding and Dartmouth Hillel.
Registration is free and open to the public, and there is no deadline. One meal will be provided during a reception on the evening of Friday, April 9, and Kosher-for-Passover food will be provided for those who request it while registering. Register online and see a schedule and list of panel participants and their biographies. For more information or to register by phone, call Gail Vernazza at 646-2545.
By AMANDA WEATHERMAN
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Grace Paley