From Auschwitz to Ithaca: The Transnational Journey of Jack Geltwert Book

Most Holocaust testimonials focus on the wartime experience, to document the atrocities that occurred. What happened during the war clearly is important but also crucial is how subjects come to understand their lives and create meaning and a new life after the war. Many Jews experienced similar transformations in a similar manner - e.g., boycotts of Jewish stores, being taunted, being herded into a ghetto, train rides to concentration camps, the camp experience, death marches - but due to various configurations of personality, family history, age, class, life-cycle stage, nationality, culture, and availability of family members, all these stories have their own particularities and they were experienced and processed differently. The ways in which Holocaust survivors' lives have been reconfigured in a post-Holocaust world, as displaced persons, as refugees and transnational subjects, most of them in diasporic settings far from their native homes, then, is what is intrinsically different. This focus on a reconfigured post-Holocaust life guides Diane Wolf's interview and understanding of Jake Geldwert's narrative and gives it a substantially different spin from conventional Holocaust testimonials.