Introduction: Bringing the Past into the Present: Family Narratives of Holocaust, Exile, and Diaspora

Abstract

When I first began documenting my mother's experience of the Second World War and its aftermath, I had no idea that other anthropologists were engaging in similar endeavors. Since this collection of papers, at its core, is about a set of stories, I would like to introduce it with an anecdotal account of how this anthology evolved, for the end product is truly the result of a collaborative effort.1 One day, while working on an unrelated topic concerning health care, I took down Philippe Bourgois' ethnography, In Search of Respect, from my shelf. In glancing at the acknowledgements, I was surprised to read the following tribute to his father, Pierre Bourgois: "Perhaps the fact that he escaped in 1944 from one of the labor camps outside Auschwitz instilled in me as a child a determination to document institutionalized racism and human tragedy..." (1995:xii). I remember thinking how remarkable this was, for I had similar feelings about my mother's experience of the concentration camps. Sometime ago, I had come to realize that my rejection of racism and false difference was influenced, in part, by the awareness of what my mother (and millions of other people) went through as a consequence of institutionalized racism and hatred [End Page 7] that characterized Nazi rule and culminated in the Holocaust. I contacted Philippe, and we began a long and fruitful correspondence, for it turned out that both of us were pursuing parallel projects with our parents. Both of us were committed to using our stories to examine larger social processes and historical forces which shaped that era and continue to act as catalysts for violence and oppression. In the meantime, a friend sent me a book that she thought might be helpful in my work. It was titled Exile: A Memoir of 1939, originally written in the 1960s by an Austrian Jew, Bronka Schneider, but edited by her niece, anthropologist Erika Bourguignon and a colleague, Barbara Hill Rigney. I found much in that slim volume that resonated with my own evolving ideas. In the foreword to this book, Bourguignon asks a compelling question: "How do ordinary people live in extraordinary times?" (Schneider 1998:x). Erika and I met several months later, over a long breakfast at a professional meeting. I learned more about her family's flight from Austria soon after the German annexation, and we spent quite a bit of time talking about what happened in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust—how did people pick up the shattered fragments of their lives? Another extensive correspondence ensued. The following November, while at the annual American Anthropological Association meetings, I ran into an acquaintance, Alisse Waterston. In exchanging pleasantries, we realized that we had both traveled to Poland that summer, not a common destination. I had gone there with my mother, who was then 90 years old, to revisit family and sites from her youth. Alisse had no remaining family in Poland; instead, she was there to see and record sites and memorials to the Jewish past, including the tragic past of the village in which her father was born and raised, Jedwabne. She, too, was pursuing a life story—that of her father. I had heard of Jedwabne, for it was the subject of a recently published book by historian Jan Gross that had generated a lot of controversy in the Polish and Polish-American press. As the subtitle of Neighbors notes, the book is about the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community in that Polish town. Alisse and I met the following day for a breakfast that lasted through three pots of hotel coffee, for we discovered a multitude of parallels in our respective parent life story projects. As I look back on my notes from that meeting, I see that Alisse and I also talked about how her own family's story shaped her views...