A Historian's Many Pasts

All children, sooner or later, learn that something preceded them, and that the universe did not spring into being at their birth. Most also come to know some small part of history through their parents’ accounts or those of their grandparents. There is always a thrill of discovery when children learn how it used to be before they were born, or, even better, about some intimate part of a parent's long-ago life that is shared with the child. My thrill came early and it came with a shiver. As a child of parents who knew the Holocaust, the most tomblike of pasts, in all its details of death and destruction, I learned that the past was real and immediate, and that it explained who you are and who you might become. One of my first memories is asking my mother what had happened to ‘them’ – those children taken away never to return. She had no doubt been telling me about these children. She never entirely answered, or, if she did, I do not remember what she said. I do remember what I said: ‘Will they take me too?’ Her answer was emphatic, ‘No! never’. And so it was, they did not come to take me away to wherever it was that the others had gone. But she could not stop me from being drawn to the past, not to their past exactly, but to a sense that the present was never sufficient, and that the past was as real as the present and quite as meaningful.

This was partly because my mother had an excellent memory and she told me many stories about a past that I needed to know about. My mother enjoyed many of her memories and telling about them. She also suffered from them, but as a child I always thought of them as our special bond. Her memories, so important to her, so full of life, also became my memories. Memories of her past I made into the past which I had never known, and which I would some day come to call history.

After we came to the United States my special past also made me different. It provided me with a gauge, a way of evaluating what I heard, saw and read, and how I acted. Whether any of these were on a par with what I knew of her life and of the many lives she had come to represent became the basis for my judgement of what was real and important. It also provided me with a world of contrasts to reflect upon. This gave me an anchor and an albatross; both added weight to a little girl's life. Because the world was a place full of callow people, many did not see the weight of this knowledge, I thought. Whenever I found my parents lacking in some essential quality that others valued – youth, good looks, modernity, education, I remembered that they had in abundance what everyone else lacked – a painful past, a past so painful that the experiences of others around me could not surpass it – neither a grandmother's illness nor even a child's suffering. So my parents became heroes of suffering and endurance.

No child's pride can be filled only with tales of suffering and endurance. When I was in fourth grade, a very cruel teacher, whose name I have forgotten, discounted an essay I had written about my parents when we were assigned to write about ‘man's indomitable spirit’. It was about their experience in the camps and the loss of their families, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers. ‘What does this have to do with man's indomitable spirit?’ she wanted to know. ‘They were dominated in body and spirit.’ This teacher had not read Primo Levi, but she had her own ideas of the Holocaust. She read my essay aloud in class and found that it utterly misunderstood the assignment and missed the point. I did not write about it again in school, ever. What I had seen as a sign of great strength of spirit and the equal of all other good things put together, she had ground to dust, to the dust to which Hitler had reduced ninety-nine per cent of all those whom my parents had once known and loved. She had added my father and mother's lives to that dust.

It must have been after this (or was it just a coincidence in timing?) that I began to describe myself as a German immigrant, drawing upon my birth in Hannover, rather than my real roots in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I was not dust. I had meaning in American terms. And American terms became my terms, my orientation, my destiny, and my history. I had become an explorer of the past (it could not be otherwise), but of a new past, a past that I chose rather than one that had chosen me. I would set out now to learn about that past and to make it my own. Over the years of my education, this is just what I did. I learned about American history, but with a difference. I saw what others never looked for; I noticed and evaluated what others took for granted.

In some ways, I have always brought to my studies of American history that student perspective, one that was eager to understand experiences that were viscerally foreign. This meant that for me American society and culture, which my friends took for granted as the happy givens of existence, were areas to reflect upon and study. I learned to incorporate them differently from those to whom it was simply habitual, and my imitation was always mediated by some measure of reflection. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to Freudian psychology as soon as I discovered it as a Barnard freshman. It provided a means to penetrate meaningfully behind the surface appearance of behaviour to matters about which we are hardly conscious or aware. It also became a form of self-discovery. In college too, and later in graduate school, after having mastered English and become enough ‘Americanized’ to pass, I still saw the young people around me, so casually and seamlessly American in clothes, demeanour and slang, as a peculiar breed that both explained Americans and themselves demanded explanation. This observation became the basis for my first serious historical study, The Damned and the Beautiful (1979). It was not simply that history came naturally to me as a form of inquiry and explanation, but that American history held secrets of which most Americans seemed largely unaware, and with which I still needed to familiarize myself.

My unusual perspective on American history was reinforced by teachers such as Richard Hofstadter and Robert Merton, scholars who sought out the complexity beneath social patterns and studied its shadowy behavioural outcomes. Through them, I became aware that my very status as an outsider gave me a useful angle. It is hard to exaggerate how influential Hofstadter was to this process of professional formation, not just because he made this posture of inquiring from the margins legitimate, but because he validated intellectual forms of knowing by his persistent questioning of dominant and hand-me-down historical paradigms. In questioning these, Hofstadter suggested that real historical knowledge was never easy or simply second nature, but often a personal struggle against the grain.

It was almost natural that I should have taken on the subject of immigration and education as the subject of a second book, since this was certainly how I had come to imagine my own experience. I was an immigrant, and everything I had come to know about America had come through education of one kind or another. Outside In (1991) grew out of that self-perception. But I was convinced that the issues were much larger than the ordinary public schooling that most historians had studied, and that immigrants were only some of the many outsiders who required examination in order for us to understand how education operates in a complex pluralistic society. In this, the book was perhaps too ambitious and thus not quite focused enough to yield the answer to how American society schools its many diverse constituents that I had set out to discover.

There came a time, many years after I had come to California (which entailed a whole further set of arduous efforts at understanding), when I thought I had finally mastered the art of being American. It came, oddly, through my children, whose remove from my parents’ past was so complete that I could not help but borrow some of their naïve sense of place. Maybe this was why I feared their loss more deeply than any rational calculation would allow; or maybe my parenting brought me unconsciously back to my mother and her very real experience of losing a child. It was shortly after my first child was born that I became attuned to something in the American experience that spoke directly to me as a mother first, and then as a historian. Fears about abducted children were just surfacing in the media when I became sharply aware of the phenomenon as an important subterranean current of contemporary experience. When I first became convinced that this was a serious area of inquiry and, like all things that it surely had a history, many of my colleagues were sceptical or dismissed the notion as hardly worthwhile. As it turned out, by searching once again in an area that was barely even marginal to most historians, I found a source of very commonly experienced anxieties and emotions. I can hardly claim that Kidnapped (1997) is the work of an outsider, but it is most definitely the work of a historian whose sense of what belongs in the profession is not exactly conventional.

My work as a historian of deeply-inscribed patterns of thought, emotions, and behaviour had brought me many rewards. It had made me an American historian, a writer, and a teacher of a past that I had gradually come to believe was my own. Then I stumbled over my appropriation of that past, once again, before a large audience of my peers. I was asked to moderate a keynote session of a meeting of the Organization of American Historians. The subject was the American experience of World War Two, a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration. I was honoured to be on stage with several previous presidents of the organization, among them men and women I hugely admired. The audience was very large. These historians spoke of their experience of the war, in battle, as liberators, on the home front, from many perspectives of race, gender and background. I introduced each of them with great fanfare and encouraged discussion as charmingly as possible. But I did not speak, not of my experience, not of my parents. I would not be put to shame in front of my colleagues, to be told once again that I had missed the point. What did a child of Holocaust survivors have to add to such a discussion of the American experience of World War Two? I had not yet been born, had no personal experiences of the war, and my parents were a universe away. It took a good friend, and a sensitive historian, Linda Kerber, after the session, to point out the obvious. I had so separated off my American history from that other past, so feared that my past had no sufficient qualities to stand up to the scrutiny of historians, that I had missed what was the opportunity of a lifetime to bring my parents’ story and my own into the history about which I had become an authority. I, a social historian dedicated to telling about the people's past, had not included my family among this people.

This incident made me confront my limitations of vision, of courage, and of confidence. It also forced me to ask about the artificial boundaries we impose on the study of history, the problems of unconventional historical sources, and the authority of our memories. These are all subjects currently discussed in the profession. But I decided to write a book not aimed at the profession. It was going to be a personal memoir of a historian rethinking the past. It would be about me and my family and the facts of Holocaust survivorship in this particular instance. How that experience has influenced me as a historian is more difficult to assess. Certainly, my experiences as a child who, as a result of her mother's stories, regularly imagined a very different past made history a real presence in my life. To understand and analyze both the history to which I was born and that which I had made my own was a lifelong engagement, and became a fact of personal identity. I now know that I also tried to shut myself off from some of that past. History as a discipline takes us over, and while our own histories can nibble away at the margins (as mine surely has, as an immigrant, a woman, a mother), it is harder to say precisely how the specific past I am now writing about, in a memoir, has influenced my work as a historian. It made me a historian by instinct. Maybe that is enough.

If the perverse need to keep things separate made me long hesitate to include my parents into the history I studied, the fear of exploiting the Holocaust for professional gain made me equally reluctant as I was choosing a career. Their past had caused them great pain and me some small shame; it had been a sacred experience to be kept separate from the mundane things I studied. Today's Holocaust ‘industry’ has proven to me that the exploitation of the experiences of others for various kinds of profit is indeed a real hazard. At the same time, the current uses of the Holocaust also mean that we have enlarged our history significantly. Keeping it unknown does not help to keep it sacred. Rather, it is to deprive each of those who suffered of the very possibility of historical notice. It is better, I have concluded, for those of us who did not know it all to tell even a small part of the story. Each story is a necessary part of that reconstruction since the event itself is so profoundly alien to the ways in which we normally know and to everything we assume to be normal. And to know it, even marginally, requires that we know its personal details, one by one, so that we may fracture that awful, and all too convenient, historical summary of the six million obliterated (vernichtet), into the loss of a mother, a father, or a child. To this, I hope I can add a small piece of history without exploiting the lives of those whom I knew and loved, and the many I did not know.

I am doing this not as a historian of the Holocaust, nor as an American historian, but as a historian who has decided that there are some things that must be told, no matter the form. My growing sense of myself as such a historian has also allowed me to question the very boundaries of place to which we have long been accustomed. As I try to move toward a more global history of children, I am seeking to overcome those boundaries and striking out to imagine our pasts in the fullest human terms. Maybe all of history is personal in some way, but some things that are personal do not become history. While my book about my earliest history, the history that made me a historian, may not become a history of the Holocaust (I am too old to change my professional identity) it can, at last, allow me to reflect upon the history I never managed to forget.