The sufferer and the witness download 320

#The sufferer and the witness download 320 series#

In tandem with his historical investigation, Reich researches and details the findings of psychiatrists and social workers about the warping legacy of trauma upon the sufferer, and its distorting ripples outward to touch all those close to the sufferer. And it is Reich the son who, in addition to exploring the history that throttles his family and all the other families along the well-tended streets of his suburban youth, turns his investigatorвЂ™s eye to the question of trauma-its corroding power, the ways we pass it from one generation to the next. ReichвЂ™s long experience as a journalist serves him (and us) well, since he demonstrates an admirable doggedness in unearthing the particulars of his parentsвЂ™ terrorized wartime days-he visits archives and interviews surviving witnesses in his extended family throughout Europe, pores over documents in Holocaust museum collections here and abroad, visits the sites of his parentsвЂ™ too-numerous sorrows.Д«ut Reich is also writing as a son, a nice Jewish boy from Skokie, who only learned later that not all moms sit tensed in sleepless vigilance, peering out the window in their darkened living room, every passing car a threat who did not realize that not all dads toggle between coiled silence and explosive anger.

Reich writes with great tenderness about his motherвЂ™s break at 2001, at the onset of dementia, overpowered by the resurgence of the trauma she had suffered as a young girl in her native Poland, fleeing and hiding from the Nazi execution squads who in 1942 had marched into her village and slaughtered nearly all its inhabitants. It is precisely this sort of confounding good fortune that animates Howard ReichвЂ™s вЂњThe Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations With Elie Wiesel.вЂњ Reich, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who mostly covers music, weaves together the fractured tale of his own familyвЂ™s sad legacy-both his parents were survivors of the Holocaust who locked away the suffering they endured in a vault of adamant silence, a silence his father never broke, and one his mother only obliquely, disjointedly, ended. If such a figure were to make time for you-just you, granting you their fullest attention, their least-guarded self-what would you say to this figure? What would you ask of him?

#The sufferer and the witness download 320 series#

Further, imagine if you can, that the figure with whom you have had this series of providential audiences is a direct witness to history, its chronicler and steward, a clear, plangent voice calling to posterity, but also an individual compelled by cruel circumstance to withstand depthless horrors. Imagine if, over a period of several years, you were granted the privilege of having a series of one-on-one conversations with a learned and congenial figure who also was one of the worldвЂ™s foremost authorities on a subject of abiding interest to you, personally, and to your family? What if you were permitted an unanticipated level of access to the probing mind and expansive heart of an intellectual hero-someone you, along with the wider world, have esteemed, and that you found this person to be as wise as they were approachable, as unassuming in manner as they were bountiful in insight.