‘An Immediate and Violent Impulse’

Abstract

This essay grows out of a twenty-year project interviewing and re-interviewing a group of Holocaust survivors with whom I began speaking in the late 1970s.3 In contrast with projects based on one-time ‘testimonies’, my interest has been in the ways that recounting evolves over time, within sustained conversations, themselves contextualized by a changing cultural conversation about survivors and about the Holocaust more generally. As many have observed, that wider conversation has, indeed, changed dramatically during the past two decades.4