Call of Memory reviewed on Lookstein Jewish Education email list
June 3, 2008
Reviewed by Emily Amie WittyWhen the editors of the two-volume The Call of Memory: Learning About the Holocaust Through Narrative: An Anthology and A Teacher's Guide (Shawn & Goldfrad, 2008, Ben Yehuda Press) asked me to contribute an essay on teaching the little-known short story "Prelude" by Albert Halper, I expected to write a standard lesson plan overview, starting with a rationale, ending with assessment techniques, and including vocabulary and adherence to state standards. What they requested instead was a first-person narrative of my actual classroom experience that included those traditional components but that reflected as well a teacher-as-researcher approach to sharing truths about readers confronting the Holocaust experience.
I knew that the 508-page Teacher's Guide to the 27 carefully chosen short stories in the Anthology would offer sound and immediately useful classroom-tested strategies, historically contextualized and age-appropriate, because I know most of the contributors: master Holocaust educators who had studied the subject over many years at intensive seminars at Yad Vashem and the USHMM. The addition of 22 original, academic, and insightful literary analyses of the short stories, however, written by Israeli, Australian, and American professors, is what makes the Guide a uniquely helpful resource.
Each literary analysis is paired with a teacher's thoughtful discussion of the same story, presenting educators with the gift of a prism, a multiplicity of ways of seeing, understanding, and teaching the literature. Appropriate for a wide range of grades (8th though graduate school), subjects (English, history, humanities, religion, psychology), and learning and teaching styles, this set is effective any way it is used.
The narratives in the 275-page Anthology include those by revered authors Bernard Gotfryd, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, and Ida Fink as well as additional stories by less well-known survivor authors, including those who wrote during the Shoah, such as Isaiah Spiegel and Rachmil Bryks. This collection, notable for its chronological and themed organizing principle as well as for the exquisite narratives themselves, is a vital addition to any Holocaust library.
The selected narratives avoid the most horrific of testimonies, yet they depict forcefully the insidious and sinister evil of the perpetrators. They describe with equal clarity and sensitivity the desperation, fear, uncertainty, and powerlessness of the suffering Jews as the stories focus on varied moments of Jewish response, allowing readers to recognize the individuality of each Jew struggling to maintain a semblance of humanity in those murderous times.
One of the most compelling elements of this publication is that the conversation and the learning continue in an online Community of Practice (CoP) at http://callofmemory.ning.com , where educators using this resource are able to share their experiences with colleagues. An Afterword that includes new teaching suggestions has already begun on the site.
Emily Amie Witty
Director, Manhattan Educational Resource Center
Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York
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