Lexington Books
Pages: 224
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-66690-744-5 • Hardback • May 2024 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-66690-745-2 • eBook • April 2024 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Sheila E. Jelen is Zantker Professor of Jewish literature, culture and history at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and the director of the Jewish studies program.
Introduction: The Cracow Ghetto Resistance and Its Testimonies
Chapter 1: “Sovereign Consciousness”: Photography and Audiovisual Testimonies
Chapter 2: “We Knew We Could Never Triumph”: Hela Schüpper-Rufeisen (1921–2017)
Chapter 3: “The Accident Which Pursues the Witness”: Rivka Kuper (1920–2007)
“The Accident Which Pursues the Witness”: Rivka Kuper (1920–2007)
Chapter 4: “I Ran Around between the Legs of All the Elders”: Yehudah Maimon (1924–2020)
Chapter 5: “So That My Death Will Be Sweet”: Shifra Lustgarten (1923–99)
Postscript: “A Delicate Knowledge”
Sheila Jelen skillfully and sensitively creates a compelling intertextuality between testimonies given by the same group of people at different times, for different purposes, and in different formats. She develops a fascinating close reading of this ‘family of testimonies’ as literary palimpsests that invite her readers to engage deeply with the people, the historical and continuing trauma, the events, and the past and present contexts of witnessing.
— Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sheila Jelen’s Testimonial Montage is a pathbreaking contribution to literary and narratological approaches to testimony. Jelen demonstrates how techniques of close reading can be made productive for the analysis of survivor testimonies, while still maintaining an appreciation for the dignity and integrity of the survivor’s performance of the role of witness. A specific set of testimonies is interpreted in an exemplary manner, reading them both as individual performances of memory while also acknowledging the shared context of their production. Testimonial Montage proposes an ethics of critical but respectful, open-ended but rigorous reading that should resonate widely amongst scholars of testimony.
— Peter Davies, University of Edinburgh