Family Remembrance, “Received Memory,” and Holocaust
Time: 2025-09-18 12:00 - 14:00
Location: Small Hall at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Michael Frisch
Events within this Session
Family Remembrance, “Received Memory,” and Holocaust Oral History - OIHA 2025
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
I come from a large Jewish family rooted in Eastern Europe. Though its Polish side mostly perished in the Holocaust, I had important rela=onships with my Polish rela=ves in America. These included my paternal grandmother, her siblings, and an especially close cousin, who with his two brothers escaped the Nazis from a town near Kraków, their home for genera=ons. This cousin’s niece, now 90, recently published a memoir about her surviving the Holocaust as a child. Her story awakened connec=ons that I, and other rela=ves, have to family we can no longer know and to the events that shaped their lives. I par=cipated in a family Zoom organized by the author’s son, last summer. This inspired me to begin collec=ng oral responses to my cousin’s memoir and to old family photographs. I met the oral history challenge of how to learn from full tes=monies and fragments of “received memory,” heard oMen when we were children, by using PixStori, an online plaPorm that gathers brief audio responses to archival and family photographs. These story fragments about people, objects, ordinary life, and trauma=c events were woven together into a kind of mosaic that tells a larger story. I will present and discuss this “mosaic of memory” at IOHA, assessing the use of “received memory” in oral history and its historical significance.
Speakers
The Interactions of Family Oral History Memories
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
Dr. Mary Louise Contini Gordon (Mary) will share what she has encountered about family memory, (first and secondhand, routine to epochal, humorous to poignant) especially from the research for her third book, Family Oral History Across the World (Routledge 2024,) based on 50 recorded interviews from people worldwide including Poland. With visuals, photos, artifacts, and quotes derived from the interviews, she will share oral history examples across diverse populations whose family experiences ranged from comfortable to having lived in despotic regimes, war torn, or poverty-stricken situations. She will address the intersections of emotion and ethics with memory along with the need to navigate family dynamics when stories conflict and/or include trauma or secrets. She will share a family history project strategy that involves a core team of family members upfront and along the way. She will end with a story of a fiery red sky turned to gratitude.
Speakers
Family Album – a Chronicler’s Coded Message
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
The family album is a trigger for memories. It is also an elemental link between our roots and our progeny, between our family of origin and our family of procreation. The family album is like other ceremonial artifacts. In African countries, tribes may honor their ancestors by digging up their bones and performing a dance, connecting the past to the present. In Japan, ancestors are honored at a Shinto altar, a tamaya – there displayed is a photo of the deceased relative. In Mexico, families celebrate the Day of the Dead – where ofrendas, similarly, have photos of the deceased. We have a family album on the living room table. An album is a discussion prompt. It is a testimonial of belonging. Consequently, all these practices and ceremonies indicate that, to be members of society, we must share our cultural knowledge. Before the advent of photography, only the wealthy could afford portraits. With the invention of the daguerreotype and, thereafter, the Kodak box camera, democratization of image-making and the concomitant oral annotation became common. Thus, a family album is a nascent, imbedded technology-dependent cultural phenomenon that connects the family to the community, because we share our recollections with a select audience. A family album is a kernel of cultural values: Whom we include in the family album; whom we annotate; and whom we remember, defines the importance of the individual to the family. Lastly, because family albums are now so pervasive, we do not need to explain why they exist: the cultural meanings are implicit: the notion of posterity is implicit. Thereby, the audience, including us, many years later, through change, as we grow old, is implicit and envisioned – a seed, a sign of hope, a sign of our future.
Speakers
Family Zoom Meetings and Informal Recordings as Documents of "Received Memory": Emerging Oral History Tools and Approaches
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
Speakers
Innovation Combining Oral History and Photographic Research Methodologies: Writing Compelling Poetic Prose in a Lithuanian Community Study
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
This study concerns a Lithuanian first-generation immigrant community who sought refuge in Australia in the aftermath of World War Two. Research as an oral historian and artistic photographer engaged in oral history-led creative arts practice methodologies over an extended period, enabling analysis, interpretation and presentation of a rich oral history and photographic dataset in innovative ways, in Saulėje ir šešėlyje. In Sunshine and Shadow. The immigrants’ and the author’s voices in creative writing in the narrative’s chapters, comprising text and historical and new photographic image essays, overcome the silencing, isolation and trauma endured, arising from displacement from their oppressed homeland and discrimination in Australia. Insightful witness accounts are achieved in text essays containing immigrants’ compelling oral histories and the author’s expressive, reflective prose: the central core of each chapter. Expressive writing was influenced by social documentary photographers who record evocative stories of marginalised people. The authorial prose describes, interprets and reflects on the community’s historical and contemporary images referenced from image essays, as well as the researcher’s image-making, observations, and the significance of photographs on display and interactions with interviewees in their homes. The photograph and photographing are also incorporated for structuring the text essays. Oral histories are given prominent display as discrete text-image voices or are woven through authorial prose. Authorial prose is also enriched and substantiated through archival, historical and cultural research. The photographic elements in text essays make a substantial contribution to an enhanced reading of the authorial prose and oral histories, enabling a reader’s closer emotional attachment to and understanding of the interviewees’ character and the Lithuanians’ experiences of darkness and light. Text essay readings inform the multi-modal writing and orality in image essays. The book’s innovation integrating oral history and photographic research throughout its interwoven entirety, has realised a deeper, more nuanced, evocative narrative.