Domestic Listening Across Generations: Irene Oore’s The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore’s 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore’s text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother’s stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave.