carol a. kidron university of haifa embracing the lived...

CAROL A. KIDRONUniversity of Haifa

Embracing the lived memoryof genocide:Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory workat the House of Being

A B S T R A C TThe House of Being is a Holocaust-survivor geriatriccenter and memorial museum in Israel, wherelifeworlds and deathworlds coexist to create a “livedmemory” of the Holocaust past. Its agenda, decor,and provocative commemorative practices engendermovement between everyday life in the present andthe genocidal past. Humor, for instance—the Housegenre—allows Holocaust descendants to explorecontradictions between their familial livedexperience of genocide and the “dead memory” ofnational commemoration. Sustaining a balancebetween a departure from and accommodation tomainstream national memory work, ludic memoryreinvigorates the commemorative landscape. Theactivities that take place at the House, as well as itsdesign and ambiance, problematizeconceptualizations of commemoration, traumaticloss, serious humor, and the sequestration of deathin everyday life. [memory, commemoration, serioushumor, museum, lifeworld–deathworld, Holocaust,compliant resistance]

As Holocaust Memorial Day approached, I decided to expandmy usual ethnographic circle of Israeli sites of Holocaust com-memoration and visit what I was told by one of my Holocaust-descendant informants would be a “refreshingly different”place. My curiosity piqued, I made my way to a small town in

central Israel, to a tiny Holocaust memorial museum–pedagogic centerthat doubles as a survivor geriatric center, a place called the “House of Be-ing.”1 As I entered the nondescript cottage, a Holocaust survivor member ofthe House, who had apparently brought a relative to visit for the first time,was in the process of introducing the woman to Tsipi Kichler, the center’slarger than life founder and manager.2 As I approached them, Tsipi turnedto me, pointed to the survivor member, and jovially asked me, “Do you seethis woman? Can you imagine, as fat as she is today, that she hid in a pit dur-ing the entire Holocaust? Can you believe that this FATSO could have everactually FIT in a pit? Today,” she continued, grinning and shouting, “shewouldn’t be able to get in or get out of a pit!!!” In a gesture recalling MikhailM. Bakhtin’s (1968) commentary on transfigured bodies and movement inand out of apertures, Tsipi put her arms around the now-obese woman’swaist and pretended to trap her in a virtual pit. Tsipi, herself a generouslyproportioned middle-aged woman, then doubled over in laughter. Both thenewcomer and I were taken aback and stared in shock as Tsipi and the sur-vivor member laughed and hugged. Tsipi then pinched the relative on thecheek and said, “You’ll get used to us, you come join our choir, maybe, cre-ative writing class, here you’ll be loved . . . and have tons of fun.”

A week later, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, I visited the Housea second time, expecting a far more reverent and morose commemorativemood. I was most interested in an event advertised as the “Second Gener-ation All-Night Vigil,” hoping to continue my fieldwork on therapeuticallyframed self-help groups for so-called emotionally troubled children of sur-vivors. However, again, the mood was not at all what I expected. Tsipi wasat it again, raucously performing her bizarre antics to a crowd of Holocaust

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 429–451, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01264.x

American Ethnologist � Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010

descendants. After asking the middle-aged descendants tosettle down so that “we can begin our festivities for thisyear’s Holocaust Holiday” (Israelis never refer to it as such),Tsipi, a child of survivors herself, said, “I want to tell youabout some interesting phone inquiries I received . . . aboutthe pedagogic center.” As participants began to giggle, Tsipicontinued, “This teacher called me . . . she said she wasan ED-UUUU-CA-TOR and asked me in a very importantvoice, ‘What do you have on exhibit? . . . I want to bring myclass to the museum’ [mimicking the stereotypical voice ofa tight-laced teacher]. I told her, ‘Well, I strip naked, how’sthat for an exhibit?’” The shocked teacher asked, “Whatdo you mean?!!!” and Tsipi responded, “‘What’s the prob-lem? My mother stripped in Auschwitz, and I do a reenact-ment, don’t you want an authentic exhibit?’ She never calledback [grinning], I guess she’s dead.” Although the educatorin question did not bring her class to the House, with thefinancial support of the municipal government, nationalboard of education, and private donations, a great manyschoolchildren from across the country have spent hourswith Tsipi and her survivor witnesses, hearing Holocausttestimonies, embracing the survivors, and, of course, get-ting a taste of gallows humor.

After Tsipi’s “opening act,” the Holocaust descendantstold tales into the night of their childhoods in the shadowof parental suffering. These emotionally moving accountswere intertwined with black humor and Yiddish sing-alongs, and the mood of the gathering was generally jubi-lant. The event culminated in a festive candle-lit meal atdawn. If this were not sufficiently baffling to the uniniti-ated, the room in which the ludic vigil took place was deco-rated like a circa 1950s (drab) living room, except for mem-bers’ prewar family photos—literally hundreds of them—covering the walls (see Figure 1). In contrast to the iconicsignification of death and suffering in photos at conven-

Figure 1. One corner of living–heritage room. (All photos by C. Kidron.)

tional commemorative sites, the photos in the House boreno textual framing that would signify the fate of the familiesrepresented in them.3 Like the double message of the vigiltalk—which combined humor with troubled legacies—thephotos too signified an ambivalent duality. While function-ing as a taken-for-granted, mundane photographic back-drop to lived experience in the geriatric center, the imagesof family life at the brink of destruction also constituted ahallowed shrine to an unspeakable past.

When one attempts to make sense of Tsipi’s Holocaust“stand-up” and her unique memorial site—which doesand does not represent and sanctify genocidal suffering—numerous questions arise. Is the House of Being analternative Holocaust memorial that subverts hegemonicmonumental forms of commemoration or merely a geri-atric center for lonely descendants who hunger for Tsipi’ssincere albeit rambunctious affection? In either case, howcan participants partake in humor that profanely banalizesthe sanctified deathworld of genocide victims? How can asurvivor recount a personal tale of horrors alongside thebanality of a living-room card game? How can one explainthe dynamic coexistence of the apparently incommensu-rable dualities of mundane or profane lifeworlds and sacreddeathworlds? What are the mechanisms that constitute andsustain this juxtaposition? Finally, what kind of public com-memoration emerges out of this “unholy” combination?

I claim that it is precisely the juxtaposition of every-day survivor lifeworlds with traces of Holocaust death-worlds that creates a commemorative site of “lived mem-ory” (Halbwachs 1980) of the Holocaust past. The dualityembedded in the institutional agenda, in House decor, andin House activities, alongside humor as House genre, con-stitutes and sustains the juxtaposition of mundane life withsanctified commemoration. I assert that humor allows par-ticipants to explore contradictions between their personaland familial lived experience of the Holocaust and child-hood past and the “dead memory” of national monumen-tal commemorative discourse and practice.4 Echoing thisliminal stance between contradictory private and publicspheres and life- and deathworlds, the House both departsfrom and accommodates the mainstream, as it invites thepublic to partake in its innovative alternative to Israeli hege-monic commemorative practice.

To decipher this alternative site, I turn first to scholarlywork on commemoration and on death-related humor, af-ter which I proceed to a contextualization of the House inthe Israeli landscape. I then turn to a detailed ethnographicaccount of commemorative practice and lived experience atthe House of Being.

Representing genocidal pasts

At the heart of all commemorative projects lies the attemptto transform absence into presence (Handelman 2004).

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Embracing the lived memory of genocide � American Ethnologist

The simulacra of representation fabricate the experienceof renewed presence so that participants may revisit andreexperience what has become absent (Baudrillard 1994;Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). As a cultural feat, represen-tation is morally valorized, as it not only honors deeplymissed individuals and communities but also provides astrategically potent political and ideological model for thepresent (Schwartz 1996) while rallying and unifying hetero-geneous populations to the call of “imagined” (Anderson1983) or “collected” pasts (Olick 1999; Young 1988).

Despite the moral and political significance of com-memoration, scholars have critically deconstructed theprocesses and practices of social memory. Beyond the ques-tion of fabrication, critique has taken two forms: one fo-cusing on the absence of “lived memory” in the everydaysocial milieu and the other on the political instrumental-ization, or what Michael Schudson (1995) has termed the“distortion,” of memory. Taking up the first of these issues,Maurice Halbwachs (1980) warned that, although all mem-ory is, in fact, a social artifact, a truly collective memorycan only be maintained if traces of familial, communal, ornational memory are seamlessly interwoven into everydaylived experience. Viewed in this light, monumental com-memorative projects, ritualized ceremonies, and museumexhibits can be deemed “dead memory.” Similarly, PierreNora (1989) bemoaned the demise among the French of“lived memory” of national history and critically termedmonumental ceremonies and “lieux de memoire” sites of“frozen memory” that austerely encapsulate a past thathad all but vanished from everyday life. In the nearly threedecades since Halbwachs’s and Nora’s dire descriptions ofits demise, there have been almost no ethnographic ac-counts of lived memory (Kidron 2009; Myerhoff 1980) or ofthe subjective, familial, or communal experience of the gapbetween the subjective experience of the past and its collec-tive representations.5

Recent, more self-critical commemorative projectshave attempted to bridge the gap between the authentic,or lived, memory of an event and its monumental formsof representation by adopting the “experiential turn.” Thereturn to experience entails the active involvement of thevisitor in the commemorative process and the shift fromevent-based collective history to the subjective and mov-ing personal story. Living-heritage museum reenactment,emotionally jarring audiovisual testimonies, and hands-onactivities with surviving artifacts are designed to evoke thesenses and engender a personal experience, simulating au-thenticity and copresence.

The commemoration of genocidal pasts engendersa particularly complex “crisis of representation.” As be-moaned by Holocaust and genocide scholars, the unspeak-able suffering of forced migration or mass cultural andphysical destruction is beyond representation (Friedlander1992). Not only is it impossible in such cases to bridge the

gap between authentic traumatic experience and its com-memorative representation but interactive practices com-memorating deathworlds have also triggered critique warn-ing of the banalization of human suffering. The ethical andpsychological ramifications of the mass consumption ofdeathworlds on exhibit have evoked loaded epithets such as“Shoah business” (Cole 1999) and “dark tourism” (Lennonand Foley 2000). Museum-based simulated cattle-car ridesto Auschwitz or Israeli school trips to the death camps ofEurope have not only triggered associations with theme-park consumption but have also raised debate over the en-listment of children in civil–religious hegemonic politics ofmemory (Feldman 2008) and necropolitics (Mbembe 2003).

Beyond the ethical dilemmas of dark tourism, sitespromoting the experiential turn continue to represent the“past as a foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985), as the visi-tor sets out to tour a past that is sequestered from, ratherthan embedded within, everyday life. These commemora-tive sites remain distant and bounded off from mundanesocial life, differentiated by votive ritual behavior, conse-crated exhibit design, monumental architecture, and pro-fessional culture brokers, theme-park performers, or dei-fied survivors (Walsh 1992). When one visits these memoryparks, the distance between past deathworlds and presentlifeworlds is maintained and the past ultimately remainsa frozen, “dead” experience. Again, scholars know little ofthe process by which personal memory is enlisted to cre-ate simulated authenticity or of the emergent gap betweenlived experience and its monumental representation forpublic consumption (Wilson 2001).

Taking up the political dimension of monumentalcommemorative processes, both sociologists and anthro-pologists of memory have studied the hegemonic construc-tion of the forgotten, silenced, or politically intrumental-ized past (Argenti 2007; Goodman and Mizrachi 2008; Olick1999). Falling victim to the ravages of hegemonic strategicforgetting or the politically instrumental rewriting of na-tional narratives, the past of those who have been subju-gated may be selectively silenced (Denich 1994) and theheroic nationalist–reactionary past may be put to workin the name of either the nation-state or the subaltern.Painful pasts, in particular, have been enlisted to rally splin-tered collectives and to legitimate burdensome or morallyproblematic policies (Hayden 2007; Wilson 2001). Nationalmemorials to ethnic cleansing and mass murder enlistgenocide victims to serve the state (Hughes 2003), as theirstories provide living proof that only the nation-state hasredeemed them (Handelman 2004). Despite growing inter-est in local memory, few ethnographies have explored thosewho “passively” resist enlistment in national–hegemoniccommemorative projects, either remaining silent in the pri-vate sphere (Kidron 2009) or “making do” in communalcommemorative settings by sustaining subtle forms of localcountermemory (Roseman 1996).6

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Ethnographies of more blatant countermemory haveexplored how victims and their descendants publicly con-test hegemonically engineered genocide memory (Argenti2007; Khalili 2004). Yet these studies have depicted ritualperformances or museum exhibits: that is, periodic eventsor mnemonic sites that are ritually, temporally, or spa-tially bounded off from everyday life and, thus, do not al-low for an examination of lived genocidal memory. Schol-ars have yet to trace how personal–familial lived memorymight make its way out of the private domain into the meso,or public, sphere (Kidron 2005) to create enclaves of livedcommunal memory that exist alongside mainstream na-tional memory work. As Sharon Roseman (1996) and JeffreyK. Olick and Joyce Robbins (1998:127) assert, if we are tomove beyond the hegemonic–countermemory dichotomy,we must understand how the national–hegemonic and lo-cal countermemory interpenetrate. It is precisely in situa-tions in which the hegemonic and the local are in forced ormutually strategic dialogue that mechanisms of contesta-tion may be far more subtle and incremental in their im-print on collective experience, blurring the difference be-tween compliance and resistance (Roseman 1996). I usethe term resistance narrowly here to refer to the emergenceof a creative grassroots alternative that calls into questionmainstream forms of commemoration without entailing ahead-on politically subversive challenge intent on depos-ing monumental practice. I assume here too that despite (orprecisely because of) the emergent cooperation between lo-cal forces and national memory, this form of compliant re-sistance may gradually impact mainstream practice frombelow.

Humor may be considered a creative yet subtle mech-anism of such resistance, at once embedded in everydaylife and existing ambivalently on the border between op-position and capitulation. Ethnographies of ludic behav-ior (Overing 2000) have focused on therapeutic catharsis(Pollner and Stein 2001), on carnivalesque social “release”(Babcock 1978), or on the ludic as a component of myth andritual (Handelman 1990; Lindquist and Handelman 2001).Studies of ludic behavior as a form of resistance (Griffiths2002) depict it as a discursive tool of the weak but not asthe key genre of specific sites. In these studies, scholarsprimarily examine the sociopolitical or psychosocial whatand why of resistant humor and only secondarily the howof cultural ludic processes. Beyond our concern for themacropolitics of identity or memory, without a greater un-derstanding of how ludic processes work on the ground inmicrosettings, we cannot begin to consider how they affectthe hegemonic status quo and serve to sustain or transcendidentity-related (or memory-related) discourse or practice(Hatch and Ehrlich 1993).

Although studies of death-related serious humor havehighlighted the comic manipulation and transgression ofboundaries in the most sacred funerary or commemorative

ceremonies, such as Irish wakes (Harlow 1997) and Mexico’sDay of the Dead activities (Brandes 2003), there have beenalmost no ethnographic accounts of genocide-related lu-dic behavior.7 Nicolas Argenti’s (2007) work on clowningamong genocide descendants in Cameroon is one of thefew. The dearth of scholarship may indicate that ludic geno-cidal commemorative practice is widely considered to besocially taboo or, more simply, that such responses haveyet to be explored. Eyal Zandberg (2006) explains that theIsraeli nation-state, dependent on foundational Holocaustgrand narratives, cannot tolerate the ludic genre in con-ventional commemorative practice and thus has marginal-ized Holocaust-related subversive humor to popular cul-tural comedic performance. In contrast, literary critics haveexplored genocidal humor as a microcultural mechanism ofcatharsis, as passive resistance, and as an exploration intothe ambiguities of traumatic lived experience and descen-dant genocide legacies (Des Pres 1988; Young 1998).

An ethnographic account of the House of Being thusdepicts the way humor, as a key cultural mechanism, func-tions to allow descendants to explore the incongruity be-tween national monumental narratives and the familiallived experience of the Holocaust to playfully weave theirown vision of the Holocaust, survivor parents, and theirchildhood past that at once resists and accommodateshegemonic memory. With the help of humor as the keygenre and the no less ambiguous decor, agenda, and activ-ities, the House as communal site of meso–public memorysustains the viable copresence of life- and deathworlds, notas simulated fabrications or dead, frozen memory, but aslived memory.

The Israeli commemorative landscape

The Holocaust has come to be perceived as Israel’s nationalfounding event, legitimating sovereignty in the Jewish his-torical homeland after 2,000 years of Diaspora (Friedlander1992). The causal link between Holocaust suffering and na-tional sovereignty gave birth to a grand narrative of “Holo-caust and Redemption.” Grafted onto the Jewish traditionalnarrative of exile and messianic redemption, the modernsecular narrative positioned the Holocaust as the climax ofcenturies of anti-Semitism. The state was portrayed as thegreat redeemer and the homeland the only sanctuary forthe Jews. National redemption and revival, however, was tobe dependent on the physical prowess and fighting spirit ofthe Israeli. Referred to as the “New Hebrew,” the Israeli wasculturally constituted as the antithesis of the passive Dias-pora Jew, epitomized by Holocaust victims. Survivors weredisdainfully labeled “sheep to the slaughter” for having pas-sively accepted their fate (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983).

This hegemonic narrative and the embedded critiqueof survivors shaped the contours of public and privateHolocaust commemoration during the first decades of

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statehood. Commemorative ceremonies, museum exhibits,and school curricula focused primarily on the small minor-ity of valiant partisan fighters, engendering another grandnarrative of “Holocaust and Heroism,” whereas personaltales of noncombatant survivor suffering were derided ormerely relegated to the private domain. Survivors and theirchildren avoided painful verbal references to the Holocaustpast, leading to a “conspiracy of silence” (Bar-On et al.1998). Subsequent to the trial of Adolf Eichmann and Israel’snear defeats in the 1967 and 1973 wars (that destabilized themyth of the New Hebrew), a shift occurred in hegemonicnarratives and public opinion, leading to renewed publicinterest in the accounts of noncombatant survivors. Sub-sequently, thousands of survivors broke their silence, withtheir public testimony taking center stage in the growingnumber of public commemorative practices.8

Children of survivors “came out of the closet” onboth the private and public fronts. Referred to as “second-generation Holocaust survivors,” descendants began to askparents about their Holocaust past and to attend publicevents at which they might explore their unique legacy(Berger 1997). Since that time, a growing number of descen-dants have participated in therapeutic and nontherapeu-tic frameworks. Despite their newfound activism, the greatmajority of survivor families in Israel have shied away frommonumental sites, avoiding the public sphere entirely andundertaking only family roots trips, engaging in intergen-erational dialogue, or producing literary and artistic works,or, alternatively, forming enclaves of communal memorywork on the margins of the national commemorative scene(Kidron 2005).9 A number of more local sites of memorypresent subtexts that critique hegemonic narratives whilehighlighting a more authentic link to the event. Neverthe-less, this critique has skirted political dilemmas regardingthe use or abuse of Holocaust memory, focusing insteadon pre-Holocaust heritage or ethnic-specific (Polish, Greek,etc.) Holocaust memory. Unlike the House of Being, thesesites do not double as geriatric or community centers forsurvivor families and they are not open to the wider non-survivor public. The House is unique, as it sustains a dailyintimate lived experience of the past and present while si-multaneously opening its doors to members of the widerpublic so that they too may partake in a critical reading ofmainstream commemoration.

I undertook fieldwork at the House of Being from2004 to 2007 as part of a broader ethnographic study oftrauma-descendant memory work in Israel (Kidron 2005,2009). This work entailed attendance of Holocaust cere-monial activities and in-depth interviews and numerousbrief informative exchanges with Tsipi Kichler. I also un-dertook in-depth interviews with survivor members of theHouse, with survivor-descendant volunteers, and with de-scendant members and visitors, and I engaged in frequentbrief conversations with survivors, descendants, and non-

survivor visitors on Holocaust Memorial Eves and on otheroccasions.10

The House of Being: Commemorative bricolageat a “geriatric center”

In 1999, Tsipi Kichler, a retired schoolteacher and child ofHolocaust survivors in her early fifties, founded the Houseof Being on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Israeli town of Holon,located seven miles south of Tel-Aviv. Established with thefinancial support of the local municipality, the House wasinitially intended as a second home for local aging sur-vivors, where, according to Tsipi, they could be “loved, re-spected and be free to just be.”11 Rather than establishing,in her words, “a survivor old-age home,” Tsipi aimed to cre-ate “a new and different kind of Holocaust pedagogic cen-ter.” When articulating the novelty of her agenda, Tsipi dis-closes a subversive spirit:

What about the sheep? . . . I’m going to love and giverespect to all the sheep, to those who did “MEH”[protracted bleating sound and laugh]. What about thesurvivor who lay in the pit? Does she get loved, re-spected? So I’ve given her and the other 3,000 Holonsurvivors . . . honorary certificates of recognition. I wantto hug them, when they visit and testify they’re lovedand embraced. Your family, you embrace. I want themto have fun here, to yell, sing, and be angry.12

The above agenda clearly resists the hegemonic narrativeof “Holocaust and Heroism” and the “sheep to the slaugh-ter” idiom. Tsipi’s immediate battlefield is the survivor com-munity sphere, yet she opens her doors to the public toprovide Holocaust pedagogy. Her commemorative arsenal,however, deviates from monumental testimonial practice,as she orchestrates an emotive alternative whereby visitorsplayfully and lovingly embrace the “humanized” survivor:

We have Holocaust documentation and commemora-tion here . . . but that’s not what we do here. I don’t wantto give answers, I want everyone to ask questions. Youcan’t come here to learn—you come here to feel!!! Wehave fun together. Kids, teachers, politicians, they getstrength from the survivors and feel what happened toa person, feel the danger of hate, and feel the impor-tance of life.

Although Tsipi may appear to be merely incorporating theexperiential turn and the interactive spirit of the new muse-ology, her elevation of the emotive experience of the sur-vivor and her marginalization of historical knowledge ex-ceeds the more tempered hybridization of knowledge andfeeling.13

Since its establishment, the House has evolved intoTsipi’s envisioned alternative site of familial, communal,and even national Holocaust memory. On most days, the

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House functions as a leisurely geriatric center for survivorsand frequent visiting descendants. Every few days, how-ever, the cottage is transformed into a memorial museum–pedagogic center where visitors are teased and shockedby Tsipi’s grotesque humor critiquing monumental com-memorative discourse and practice. A three-day Holocaustmemorial period also entails a diverse array of emotively in-tense and no less provocative memory work. Despite Tsipi’seccentric pedagogic style and the center’s makeshift com-memorative facilities, the House has become the pride ofthe municipality, gleaning national–governmental and pri-vate philanthropic financial support.14

Emergent design and function: Weavinglife- and deathworlds

In contrast to prominently located lieux de memoire, theHouse is hidden away in a neighborhood park, at the endof a cul-de-sac densely surrounded by apartment build-ings. The House itself is a 40-year-old two-and-a-half-roomcottage surrounded by a high hedge. One enters the prop-erty through an iron gate and walks across the yard toreach the House. In the yard are two statues, one entitled“The Mother,” depicting a woman reaching out for her chil-dren, and the other entitled “Two Generations,” depictinga woman survivor carrying her adult child on her shoul-ders; the child carries a sign reading “Remember and marchforward” (see Figure 2). A multicolored “Wall of MemorialScrolls,” designed in the shape of a figure eight, is dedi-cated to the memory of relatives of House members whoperished in the Holocaust (see Figure 3). At the center ofthis curving wall, a tall pole carries a sign with the wordsto be (or being). These fixtures hint at the House’s themesof familial–generational ties, forward vision, and “living”memory.

Figure 2. Commemorative statue in the yard.

Figure 3. Memorial wall.

On entering the house, one finds oneself in a smallhall. One wall is covered with photos of Righteous Gen-tiles, and the other displays certificates from the munici-pality, the Ministry of Education, and the president recog-nizing the House’s contribution to Holocaust pedagogy.15

Scattered throughout are photos of Tsipi with VIPs (seeFigure 4). Memory-related biblical verses are also displayednext to an Israeli flag—all hegemonic symbols suggestingapparent accommodation to the nation-state. To the left isa fully equipped kitchenette and bathroom. To the right isTsipi’s tiny office and an additional office seating two vol-unteers (a survivor and a descendant).

Continuing from the entry hall into the larger of the twomain rooms, one is overwhelmed by prewar family photos(see Figure 1). Volunteers explain that Tsipi asked survivorsto bring them in so that “the photos might embrace [Heb.lechabek] them.” Placed frame to frame, the photos vary in

Figure 4. Entry hall.

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size and content. In general, there is little or no indication ofwhether those depicted in the photos survived or perishedin the war. Many of the House’s survivor members appearin the photos. When I first began visiting the House, a fewphotos had tiny plaques with engraved family names, butthe majority were devoid of textual “referenciality” (Zelizer1998).16 At present, there are still no photos of destruction orsuffering, solely images of prewar European life. On the wallacross from the entrance to the main room hangs a largebanner with the House logo and the words “To be and tolive.”

In sharp contrast to the museum motif of the photos,the decor is entirely domestic. To the left of the doorway isa lived-in sofa, armchairs, a coffee table, and a damaged pi-ano. Across from the entrance is a curtained window anda television and video player atop a stand with a disor-derly collection of cassettes and DVDs. To the right is anassortment of folding chairs, some open. The floor is cov-ered with a tattered Persian rug and, to top off the domes-tic ambiance, a cat roams the room. The “living room” fur-nishings, all donated, are circa 1950s Israeli in style, so thespace is not a prewar restoration. In the far left corner, hid-den from the gaze of the entering visitor, are the only quasi-Holocaust exhibits: a bust of a ghetto partisan and a tinyoil-painted triptych depicting a train pulling into a deathcamp and the redemption of survivors in Israel.17 Theseitems create a Holocaust “commemorative corner” in thepre-Holocaust family–heritage space.

The living or heritage room receives almost daily visitsby local survivors, who sit together and share meals, drinkcoffee, chat, play cards, watch TV, and play piano—whilesurrounded and “embraced” by their families on the wall.The House choir meets in the room weekly to rehearse itsrepertoire of European folk songs and Holocaust memorialtunes. Other leisure activities include a Bible study groupand a creative writing class. After it met a few times, Tsipicanceled the therapeutic support group. Members do notexhibit commemorative–votive body work; there is no self-imposed silence, sadness, or decorum. When I mentionedthe homey atmosphere to one survivor, he responded, “Thisis a home because Tsipi built us a home.” When I asked ifthey display prewar photos in their own homes, two sur-vivors said they hung photos in their bedrooms, but allothers said they kept their photos hidden in dresser draw-ers or closets. When I asked why they brought photos tothe House, their responses reaffirmed the dual domesticfamilial–commemorative agenda of the House. One sur-vivor explained, “I wanted my family around me here.”Another asserted, “We have to think about what happenswhen we’re gone.” In response to my query about a conven-tional museum as an alternative repository for their photos,one survivor explained, “This is not a museum . . . it’s morepersonal.” Another survivor said, “Here they won’t throwthem out after I die like they would in a museum.” One

may ask, then, if the House is not a museum, then whatis it?

In an attempt to explore the distinction between con-ventional museum photo exhibits of prewar Europe and theHouse’s display, I approached others with the same ques-tion.18 A volunteer survivor explained, “This is my homeand I feel good with my family [on the walls] around me.” Adescendant member added, “This place is not Yad Vashem!!![the national Holocaust museum], there are no furnaces onthe wall, no horrific images, but instead, it’s family, it’s aplace for them to be with their families, like the name ofthe place—House of Being.” Still perplexed that the imagesdid not trigger associations of genocide, I asked survivorswhat it was like to enjoy leisure hours surrounded by pho-tos that were previously hidden from view. Taken aback, onesurvivor answered with a question: “They’re family, what’sthe problem?” In contrast to the domestic lifeworld andto conventional museums, the House appears to create aspace in which one may “live” with the material presence ofthe absent dead and the ruptured prewar lifeworld withoutpainful death-related significations or ritualized mnemonicpractices.19

The living–heritage room, however, also doubles as aHolocaust testimonial hall. My choice of the term doubles isfar from arbitrary, as mundane clubhouse activities proceedunhampered by any commemorative “practice” that may goon. For example, testimonial events lack the formal tem-poral or spatial ritual borders of conventional ceremonies.After a brief training course with Tsipi, survivors testify be-fore schoolchildren, teachers, soldiers, and politicians. Inkeeping with the House’s novel approach, survivor testi-monies too depart from convention in style and content(Young 1988). According to Tsipi, “A good witness doesn’tbore these poor kids, he doesn’t go off on detailed tangents,he needs to tell them something very dramatic . . . someimportant lesson he learned about life and . . . it’s enoughand they can go home [long laugh].” Testimonies recountbrief dramatic vignettes, devoid of historical or geograph-ical orientation or background on the collective Holocauststory or even the speakers’ personal stories. Only the pathosof survival and the strength to begin life anew are high-lighted. The tales conclude not with a warning of evil lurk-ing around the corner, or the very common hegemonicnationalist–Zionist reading of personal–collective redemp-tion (Handelman 2004) but, rather, with a humanist call forkindness and love of life itself. Tsipi resists the uses andabuses of enlisted memory in contemporary Israel, not byopenly repudiating the politics of right-wing memory workor by tracing the parallels between Jewish and Palestiniansuffering, as is customary in the rare subversive Holocaustceremonies on the outer margins of Israeli society, but,rather, by, as she explains, “getting at the root of the prob-lem” and supplanting xenophobic Holocaust lessons withhumanist values of empathy and dialogue.20

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Yet the above account does not begin to describe thevery distinctive style of testimonial events at the House.During testimonies, Tsipi badgers children and adults:“Don’t you have any questions, why are you so quiet, whodied!!!??? [Hebrew slang in response to serious atmosphere],what are you—sheep??? Ask something!!! [almost shriek-ing].” Although shocked at first, the audience eventually be-gins to dialogue with the survivors, from whom they arenormally distanced by convention. Tsipi recounts an ex-ample of the “success” of her pedagogy: “One kid calledthe witness ‘a heroine.’ I screamed at the kid, ‘Heroine, youmust be kidding, she didn’t escape or fight, what’s wrongwith you?’ Another kid defended his mate and said, ‘Yes sheis, she didn’t go crazy or kill herself.’” When I asked Tsipiabout this case, she explained, “I want to make it fun, toshake them up . . . then they come out richer than when theycame in.” Tsipi utilizes black humor (“Who died?”) and in-versions that challenge hegemonic narratives (calling ques-tionless children “sheep” and survivors–sheep “heroes”) sothat the resultant shock “shakes up” the taken-for-grantedhegemonic meaning world of her audience.

The power of truly moving testimonies lies in theirability, in the words of a descendant volunteer, to “breakdown the defense barriers of two meter tall soldiers andcold-hearted politicians.” Illustrating the emotion work atthe House, one informant described how, after hearing asurvivor testify to her tragic separation from her infant onthe selection ramp at Auschwitz, a “macho” soldier raisedhis hand and said, “I don’t have a question but can Iplease give you a hug?” He towered over the survivor ashe hugged her, bringing the entire audience to tears. Thistale has taken on mythic proportions and is retold to vis-itors as emblematic of the House’s raison d’etre. Consis-tent with Tsipi’s claim that she does not want visitors “tolearn . . . what happened but to feel it,” transgressing com-memorative decorum and emotive barriers moves visitorsfrom the historical–didactic realm of knowledge to a criticaldialogue with hegemonic discourse and thus toward em-pathic experiential knowledge.

Moving through a doorway on the right wall of thefamily-heritage room, one enters the second smaller room.Three walls are covered in bookcases, filled with Holocausthistory and memoirs and non-Holocaust literature in var-ious European languages. A large wooden table spans theroom and a survivor librarian sits at a desk in the cor-ner. In full view of the visitor’s gaze, an array of Holocaustartifacts, including a camp uniform, a yellow star, and ascarf knitted in a work camp, flank the back (southern)wall. The righthand (eastern) wall of the room is coveredin family photos that, according to the librarian, “over-flow from the other room” (see Figure 5). In contrast tothose in the first room, almost all the photos in the sec-ond room have memorial plaques. This room functions as aHolocaust–foreign language library. Survivors do not check

Figure 5. Library.

out Holocaust literature, but they frequently borrow Polish,Hungarian, and German books. The librarian reported thatthe Holocaust literature is used by children and teachers. Af-ter testimonies, visitors are given a tour of the library. Thisroom is an inversion of the first room, with the primary fo-cus on Holocaust memory work and only a hint of prewarnostalgia.

The nature of their interactions with visitors attests tomembers’ perception of the House as simultaneously anintimate, domestic survivor center, a prewar heritage mu-seum, and a Holocaust museum. As visitors move into,through, and out of the house, they also move chronolog-ically from present-day Israel (the street) to the EuropeanHolocaust past (the yard and entry) and, then, to the pre-Holocaust ruptured past (the first room); they then moveforward in time back to the Holocaust past (the secondroom and yard) and finally back to present-day Israel (thestreet). However, despite the orderly linear movement, andin sharp contrast to other memorial museums, each space(or temporal experience) spills into the next. The uniqueoverlapping of spaces and temporal experiences enablesfluid movement between chronotopes, as visitors move intoand out of a past hinting at copresence.21

However, the living domesticity is the most criticalcomponent in constituting an alternative chronotopic jour-ney. Domestic decor and practices in the living room andkitchen of the cottage repeatedly shake up the progressiveand dichotomous movement between past and present.Mundane practices such as preparing lunch, watchingtelevision, or arguing about a library book, alongside“sacred” commemorative work, transform the museumand library into intimate familial spaces where one livesmemory intertwined in the everyday social milieu ratherthan observing or interacting with its exhibited–performedrepresentations.

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Diagram 1. Layout of transformed yard for Holocaust Memorial Eve.

Holocaust memorial activities at the Houseof Being

The House organizes a three-day Holocaust commemo-ration in April of each year. Events include testimonialperformances by three local survivor families entitled the“Testimony of Three Generations,” the Holocaust Eve cere-mony followed by a “Holocaust fair,” and the Second Gen-eration All-Night Vigil.

On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2004, theHouse and the yard were packed with visitors. Foldingchairs faced a makeshift stage and podium to the left of theentry and microphones for the survivor choir were set up tothe right of the stage. Visitors lit memorial candles at a tableto the right of the entry. A large tent was set up alongsidethe House, where Holocaust exhibits built by schoolchil-dren were displayed. Holocaust literature was offered forsale at a folding table in front of the House. In back of thehouse was a podium and microphone for the commem-orative practice entitled “Every Person Has a Name,” dur-ing which visitors read the names of relatives who had per-ished (see Diagram 1). Approximately three hundred peoplewandered around the yard, stopping at the statues, walk-ing around the Memorial Wall, browsing at the book stand,and moving into and out of the House. In contrast to thesilent and somber mood of visitors at conventional cere-monies, the noise and laughter were deafening. Survivors,their children, and their grandchildren, many arm in arm,bustled around the grounds. Tsipi was at the vortex of thismovement, followed by a camera crew. Dressed in a flashyblack dress, her hair dyed a brighter red than usual, sherushed around, screeching at everyone, prodding staff, cho-rists, and visitors into position. Occasionally she stopped tohug and tease a survivor, laughing boisterously.

The memorial ceremony began with conventionalcommemorative practices: an opening address by themayor, the lighting of a memorial torch, a brief, pathos-filled survivor testimony, and choir renditions of commem-orative melodies. In contrast, however, to monumental cer-emonies, the event was conducted almost exclusively byHouse survivor members and their families. The ceremonyalso did not include the usual backdrop of gruesome pho-tographs of Holocaust victims (Handelman and ShamgarHandelman 1997).22 When the ceremony started, survivorfamilies and nonsurvivor visitors who were wandering thegrounds did not immediately enter the ceremonial space oreven attentively observe at a distance but continued to nois-ily explore the nearby exhibits in disregard of what was theonly monumental–reverent portion of the program at theHouse. About ten minutes into the ceremony, Tsipi shiftedinstantaneously from diva to somber moderator, and as shetook her place at the podium, visitors stopped to listen.She recounted that, as a small child, she had overheard hermother telling a neighbor that “she saw ‘them’ burning ba-bies in front of their mothers in Auschwitz”: “I didn’t under-stand what she said but I felt I had been there with her. Aknife cut through my heart for fear that they would take hertoo . . . [her voice falters], every night I was afraid.” Turningto the survivor who had just testified, she continued, “I holdthem in my heart [she places her hand on her chest] and[her voice falters again and she pauses] and I treasure themand contain them [she begins to cry]. All of us . . . [raises hervoice] hold our relatives in our hearts and we can smell thehouses they were torn from—from the House [pauses forcomposure]. I call upon the world to stop all destruction.”

Following Tsipi’s moving account, a survivor read thenames of murdered school friends, ending with, “You con-tinue to play with me and within me . . . I am your living

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monument.” The short ceremony culminated with a read-ing by a granddaughter of survivors from the travel jour-nal she kept during her class trip to Poland: “I was in thegas chambers and I felt my grandma’s hand holding mine,telling me, ‘It’s okay, it’s over.’ And I said to her, ‘I did itgrandma, I came here for you . . . for the six million.’” Theceremony ended with the national anthem. The centralthemes of the ceremony were the rupture of the mother–child bond, the restoration of the generational chain, theenfolding of the past, and vital movement toward the fu-ture. Despite the burden of embodied memory, the messagewent, the same wounded heart could “hold” and “contain”and metaphorically reunite all the mothers and their chil-dren. Having legitimated her role as collective carrier, Tsipicalled on the audience to share her lot and become carri-ers of the dead. Visceral imagery intensified, and chrono-topic boundaries blurred; Tsipi and her audience could“smell the burning houses . . . from the House,” which, likeTsipi’s heart, contained the “present” dead. The ceremonyended with the forward-looking third-generation descen-dant bridging the past and the present, as she too crossedchronotopes to viscerally feel her grandmother’s hand, dia-logue with the past, and promise to carry it into the future.

Within seconds, the mood in and around the Housewas again noisy and chaotic. The demarcated temporal–spatial ritual borders of the very brief Holocaust ceremonydissolved as the crowd scattered in all directions. In con-trast to commemorative decorum in museums, visitors didnot line up to get into or out of the space but pushed andcut their way through and around others. Movement wascumbersome as visitors moved in family units or groups oftwo or three survivors. Tsipi’s mood shifted back to jovial-ity. Followed into the house by the camera crew, she teasedand hugged members and ribbed me as “her full-of-hot-airanthropologist.”

Following visitors around the house, I overheardbizarre dialogue between survivors and their families. Onesurvivor grabbed her daughter’s hand, pulling her into thehouse and saying, “Let’s visit the family.” Another survivormoved heavily around the heritage room, assisted by hisgrandson, and said, “Let’s go see [not look at] my broth-ers.” Taken aback, I sat down on one of the chairs under thephotos, only to hear one survivor say to another in Hun-garian, “What a great place this is, I must bring my pho-tos here too, it’s a wonderful place for the family.” Totallyconfused, I stared at all the visitors standing before imagesof their relatives. They did not cry but smiled and caressedchildren and grandchildren while pointing to specific peo-ple in the photographs. As I sat there, attempting to makesense of this behavior, a survivor approached me and asked,“Do you need help, would you like me to tell you about thisplace?” I quickly said yes, please, and introduced myself.The survivor explained, “We come here to be with our fam-ilies. Would you like to meet [not see] mine?” Standing up

but feeling quite shaky, I followed the survivor to a photo.Looking at a family portrait of two parents and six siblings,he told me, “This is my family, the family,” and then hegrinned and said, “Guess which one is me.” After I triedand failed, he pointed at each family member and told methe person’s name. Nodding speechlessly, I could only notethat he made no reference to who had survived and whohad been killed. After ten minutes of listening to him remi-nisce and gaze intermittently, silent but smiling, at his fam-ily, I mentioned that my father was the lone survivor of eightsiblings. His facial expression changed, his childlike grin re-placed by mournfulness. After a long pause, he told me thatonly two of his family members had survived. With the co-presence of his family abruptly ruptured, the survivorsilently left the room.

Moving to the library, I watched survivors and descen-dants examine exhibits. In contrast to their visit in the her-itage room, their stay in the second room was brief. Movinginto the yard, I found the space packed to capacity, a scenethat could be described blasphemously as a Holocaust “fair-ground.” In one corner, people pushed and shoved to get alook at books on sale, some arguing about the exorbitantprices. In another corner, latecomers lit candles, complain-ing that there were no matches left. Others stood aroundthe statues, expressing their interpretations of the artist’smessage, and yet others wandered repeatedly around theMemorial Wall reading the family “scrolls.” The noise wasdeafening, and as I sought a quiet corner in which to takenotes, I found myself standing in front of the “Every PersonHas a Name” podium. Most visitors apathetically pushed bythe survivor who was then completing reading a long list ofrelatives’ names.

Although Holocaust Eve events aim to commemoratethe dead, death is not evoked in all areas of the House and,where it is invoked, the dead are not signified as distancedfrom the living. The Holocaust deathworld is represented inthe yard and in the library and tent area, yet it does not in-filtrate the living–heritage room. There survivors “visit thefamily” and “introduce” their families to grandchildren andvisitors, with no signs of mourning—engaging, rather, inwhat appears like an extended-family get-together. The pre-war photo images often include the survivor alongside lostfamily members and so serve as surviving traces of famil-ial totality. As reflected in my informant’s playful request toidentify him in his family photo, the survivor is still an in-tegral part of the whole of which he was a part. Althoughincommensurate with the Western sequestration of death(Mellor and Shilling 1993), the room’s design and survivortalk and practice imply that, echoing the House banner,members enter the room “to BE and to LIVE” with, and becontained by, their families and not merely to commemo-rate them.23

One may ask the inevitable question, is the act of “be-ing with” one’s family and sensing that they are virtually

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“alive” experienced as metaphoric, or has the House cre-ated an experiential portal into an alternative chronotopic“reality” (Kravel and Bilu 2008)? Could the words on thebanner (and all House publications) imply that by allow-ing survivors to be with their families, their deceased rel-atives come “alive”? Could this explain one descendant’scomment that “only in the House can the survivors be asthey cannot be anywhere else”? My questioning of membersregarding their visits to this alternative “reality” elicited oneparticularly powerful response:

Everyone comes to visit their family, their parents, theycome for warmth, here they come and laugh, hug andkiss. I don’t remember what my parents looked like, Ibrought their picture here, it’s holy to me, but still it’snot a cemetery here, I don’t mourn them, I keep themwith me. I see this place as something living . . . I don’tfeel anything in a cemetery. It’s an empty story. . . . Here,people come joyously, not like to a sad place or to acemetery. This is not a connotation of home, it is ahome. But without the pictures, it would not be home.This became a house that was destroyed, that wasrobbed, that was burnt to the ground.

The heritage room is not experienced as a commemora-tive deathworld. The survivor insists the room is not a placeof mourning, like a cemetery, but a place of joy and fa-milial affection. The photo display elicits countless famil-ial tales, “full stories” of childhood, as person–photo inter-action (Hirsch 1997) ushers visitors back into their pasts tothe point of actual reimmersion–containment in it. As evi-dent in the informant’s reactions to my question about sib-ling survival, the smallest reference to tragic events and todeath is utterly disconcerting. One might say that my realitycheck was totally out of place because, as the survivor aboveexplains, the House is “living.” If one still doubts the possi-bility of experiential equivalence between the image as sig-nifier and the family as signified, and the possibility that, inthe proper, culturally engineered setting, one may remem-ber and experience the comforting presence of the dead,consider the final words in the excerpt above: “This becamea house that was destroyed, that was robbed.” The speakerdoes not say, “This became a house that replaced the housethat was destroyed” but, rather, “This became a house thatwas destroyed.” The House is equivalent to all those housesthat were destroyed, not a replacement or fabricated simu-lacrum but the self-same house by virtue of the fact that itis a place where the dead can be imaginatively, lovingly, andplayfully resurrected into “being and living.”

But how can the joyous reunion with the livingdead subsist alongside ceremonial representations of theHolocaust dead? How can visitors shift, within seconds,from a mournful ceremony, commemorative wall andsculptures, and recitations of the names of the dead to ajoyful reunion with those they have just commemorated?

Are commemorative practices and death itself experienceddifferently here? The mood, movement through space, andcontent of talk on Holocaust Eve point to the evocation ofan alternative relationship with and alternative presence ofthe dead. The formal ceremony asserts the experiential fea-sibility of being viscerally present in the past. The speak-ers constitute intimate generational connections that fa-cilitate access to the past and “reanimate” the dead, whocontinue living and playing within the hearts of those whotreasure them and who visit the House and “smell theirhomes.” Although movement around the yard, sculptures,memorial wall, and books signifies the loss of life, it simul-taneously resurrects and enfolds the dead, housing themamong the living. The sculpture positions the child as re-habilitated mother of a new generation that is insepara-bly linked to the past, a container for the dead while sheprogresses forward into life. The memorial wall representsthose who died while it playfully resurrects them via colorand layout and through the placement of their names alonga fixture that forces circular movement, creating a unifyingliving container for those names while pulling them intolife-giving forward motion. Finally, the crowd’s repeated cir-cular movement within and around the House grounds, inand out of its experiential core, echoes the symbolic act of“taking in” and containing the House and its images.

At around 10 p.m., survivors exited the House, leav-ing behind only descendants. Tsipi bustled into the her-itage room, where children of survivors began to arrangechairs in a circle in preparation for the Second Genera-tion All-Night Vigil.24 Tsipi turned to a few remaining sur-vivors, shrieked, “My SCH-NITZOLIM, you have to leavenow, it’s our turn, you’ve been here long enough,” and thenlaughed hysterically. Schnitzolim is Tsipi’s term of endear-ment, a play on words combining the Hebrew nitzolim(survivors) and schnitzel (Ger. fried meat cutlets). She hu-morously, lovingly, yet grotesquely creates the image of thesurvivor deep-fried in oil.25 Kicking the survivors out, Tsipiblasphemously hinted at their impending demise and at thegenerational changing of the guard (Katriel 1997).26

Tsipi began the vigil with 25 descendants as follows:“Well, shall we begin our discussion for this year’s Holo-caust Holiday?” A descendant responded, “Oh yes, this ismy favorite holiday.” Tsipi added, “Yes, we can set up ourMengalim for Holocaust Holiday [Mengalim is a play onwords, merging the Hebrew mangalim (barbecues) andMengele, the name of the notorious Nazi doctor who per-formed medical experiments on inmates in Auschwitz], andplace our shnitzolim on the fire [a reference to the Inde-pendence Day celebratory practice of barbecuing, neverpracticed on Memorial Days].” After much laughter, an-other participant joined in: “Yes, we’ll pull out that lastpiece of kindling wood saved from the fire [a metaphor forthe few survivors miraculously saved from the extermina-tion camp furnaces].” The participants joined in raucous

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laughter while I and other newcomers looked on in disbe-lief, as the jokes, which appeared integral to in-group be-havior, were far more transgressive of Holocaust “etiquette”than any Holocaust satire we had previously heard.

Tsipi then asked the participants to present whatthey had prepared for the Holiday. One participant sug-gested, “Let’s all sing ‘The Town Is Burning’ [Yiddish song“S’brennt” by Mordecai Gebirtig recounting the burning ofthe Warsaw Ghetto],” again triggering a round of laughter.Tsipi turned impatiently to one of the participants and said,“Okay . . . now read your poem.” Shifting instantaneouslyinto a serious mood, the participant read her poem entitled“They Were Heroes,” praising the emotional heroism andendurance of survivors and challenging the traditional mas-ter narrative of Holocaust and combative heroism. Thedescendant declared her admiration of her parents whileemotionally glancing at the floor. After a round of ap-plause and congratulatory compliments from the others,Tsipi added seriously, “This is the vision of the House, chal-lenging the glorification of Warsaw Ghetto fighters, we knowthey were all heroes.”

After a few moments of silence, the poet-participantsuddenly yelled out, “Yah yah, I know I’m sarut [slang, lit.scratched or touched], we all are.” After more laughter, awoman in the corner asked, “When can we eat?” The crowdlaughed again, and someone brought in a bowl of chipsfrom the kitchen, saying, “Sorry, we’re all out of potato peels[the starvation diet during the Holocaust], es es mein kind[Yid. eat eat my child, but also a pun on SS, the abbreviationfor the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or Protective Squadron].” Again,the crowd laughed. Another descendant commented, “Youknow we are not original, this humor was transmitted to usfrom our survivor parents [participants giggle at the parodyof psychological discourse on intergenerational transmis-sion of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)] . . . my motherwent back to Matthausen [a death camp], for a visit, andat the entrance the clerk asked for entry fee and she toldhim, ‘The last time I was here, Jews could enter for free!’”27

The original joke and its retelling at the vigil clearly pointto the way irony subversively “shows up the sway of deepand disconcerting forces [survivor incarceration and suffer-ing in the camp] on the trivial events of daily life [touristicentrance fees]” (Antze 2003:102–103) and thereby allows de-scendants to resist the univocal and fabricated presence ofthe past and to insist on disclosing the intensity of the un-derlying experience.

Tsipi stood in the middle of the circle and screamed, “Iwant to tell you about some interesting calls I received forour pedagogic center.” As participants giggled in the back-ground, she related the story presented at the beginning ofthis article as well as the following one:

This other teacher called, a real religious teacher—sheasked if she could bring her girls to my museum . . . she

wanted to know if the place was appropriate for reli-gious girls. I told her that at the entrance we have fur-naces and we shove the kids in, because Hitler, as ourfirst pedagogic administrator, did not distinguish be-tween religious and nonreligious kids, he killed themall. I never heard from her again either [pause] she diedtoo.

The moralistic tale satirically critiqued separatist religiouspractices and mores by recalling Hitler’s inclusive handlingof his victims. It evoked smirks from those present, andheads nodded in agreement. At this point, I was certainthat such tales were either figments of Tsipi’s rich imagi-nation or part and parcel of her own very eccentric ped-agogic style and agenda to disseminate humanist ideals.Later, I was told by volunteers that they had overheard theconversations.

After her comic rendition of her role as “curator” of theHouse, Tsipi turned to the participants, screaming, “Enoughjokes, we better start introducing ourselves.” The first par-ticipant introduced herself and said what a pleasure it wasto be back with Tsipi on “Holocaust Holiday.” She then pro-vided her yichus [Yid. pedigree] as a child of a survivor whohad gone into hiding, thereby positioning her parent andherself on the “hierarchy of suffering” (Danieli 1998), knownat the House as “Tsipi’s ladder of suffering.” Children of“hard core” camp survivors heckled her story, screaming,“You think that’s suffering, that’s a vacation.” Another par-ticipant introduced himself as a descendant of a ghetto sur-vivor. Again, others screamed, “Ghetto, what’s a ghetto—it’s just the third grade [Heb. kita gimmel, G is for ghetto].”The participant was allowed to recount his mother’s frag-mented tale of fear and hunger, again adding his avowal ofpride in her ability to start a new life. Another participanttold of her parent’s experiences as a partisan. She could notget through her first sentence without being shouted down:“No, no, you’re not even on the ladder,” at which point Tsipiadded, “Yes, you don’t belong to the sheep.”

Another participant began, “My father was inAuschwitz . . .” and was interrupted by jubilant screams,“Finally—someone who has a B.A. [Heb. boger, or graduate,of Auschwitz].” Smiling, the participant told his mother’stale of separation from her parents and of how he repeat-edly tried “to imagine how she must have been so alone andterrified.” He closed with his admiration of her “heroic”survival. The mood in the room had shifted smoothly fromlaughter to serious attention, yet, as the narrator completedhis tale, a descendant of Polish origin yelled, “Wait aminute, you’re from Hungary! I’m sorry, you people werealso on vacation, what’s a year in school, we were there forthree” (Polish Jews were sent to camps in 1943, HungarianJews in 1944). After a round of laughter, the next participantbegan, “My father was from Greece.” Tsipi screamed, “Ohno, another partisan fighter.” The participant shrieked back

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at Tsipi, smilingly but adamantly, “What, shoveling bodiesin Auschwitz isn’t good enough for you Poles?”28 She thenrecounted a short horrific tale and added, “But he was awonderful father and we had a great childhood, with lotsof love and joy, not like you pathetic Ashkenazi survivors.”Echoing Yehuda C. Goodman and Nissim Mizrachi’s (2008)findings regarding hegemonic memory and the positioningof ethnoclasses in Israel, the descendant then looked atTsipi and said, laughingly, “I’m tired of you Poles pushing usGreeks aside, I insist on being as sarut (touched) as you.”29

Continuing around the circle, a narrative patternemerged. Participants began with their names and theirparents’ position on Tsipi’s “ladder of suffering.” After re-ceiving an “academic degree” from the group, followed bycynical comments about their “education,” they continuedto tell either a tragic parental tale or a childhood tale of em-pathy with parental suffering. They ended their tale witha joke. The participants’ Holocaust narratives were thusframed by two jokes, one through which they entered thepast and one through which they exited it. The mood of thesession shifted accordingly from joviality to somber atten-tion and back instantaneously.

Only two participants challenged the fluidity and ho-mogeneity of the narrative structure and ludic genre. Oneparticipant began her turn by saying, “You all know me,I can’t do what you do, I’m sorry it’s just . . . [long tearfulpause] too hard for me to joke.” Tsipi approached the par-ticipant and said softly, “Try, please try, it’s very impor-tant . . . we’ll help you.” Smiling shyly at Tsipi, the descen-dant positioned herself high on the “ladder of suffering”and then told her parents’ tale, adding what a “great legacy”she was given by her parents, who were the “strongest peo-ple.” Tsipi capped off the tale with a joke: “That’s won-derful, but next time try to be more convincing!!” evokinglaughter. The second participant indignantly exclaimed, “Iam a teacher, I am truly shocked by what you are doing.I have always taken the Holocaust very seriously, and I’mnot even a child of a survivor!!! I came here to commem-orate. I’m shocked, the only reason I stayed was because Ithought eventually I would figure out what was going on.Can you tell me how you could joke this way?” After shoutsof laughter, infuriating the teacher, a participant explainedthe vigil’s carnivalesque reversal: “We don’t come here tocry . . . if that’s what you want, forget it, every day is Holo-caust Day for us, today we celebrate.”

At 2 a.m., descendants asked Tsipi about the “festivemeal.” Again to my surprise, they set up a table in the mid-dle of the room and brought in party food from the kitchen.A participant yelled, “We need candles for the holiday!!!” asshe “sacrilegiously” lit two memorial candles on the table.Groups of descendants informally chatted and caught upon lost time.30 At 3 a.m., Tsipi yelled for us to sit down, say-ing, “It’s my turn to tell my story.” She recounted asking hermother, as a young child, why she screamed in her sleep.

When one of the newcomers jokingly asked her, “Which de-gree do you have?” all turned with shocked and fearful looksat Tsipi, no one breathing. Tsipi venomously said, “WhenI tell my story no one jokes!!!”31 She recounted that hermother said she screamed because she was afraid of “AmonGoeth and his dog”; Goeth was the sadistic commandant ofthe Plaszow Camp, who had never “left her side”:

It was me and my mother, Goeth and that dog, everynight in bed together. I grew up with them in my bed.I was there in Plaszow and they were here in Israel.Years later I was in the Plaszow museum, and I sud-denly stood dead in my tracks when I stood face to facewith a photograph of the bastard and his dog. Therethey were, I knew them so well, my old companions,my old enemies.

Tsipi told us of her search for Goeth’s daughter and hereventual emotional meeting with the woman to discusstheir “common” legacies. Her search for closure was unsuc-cessful, as her “stepsister in suffering” would not renouncethe skeleton in her familial closet. Cynically ending her tale,she added, “The woman was so impressed by the family at-mosphere at the House that she converted to Judaism, call-ing her grandson David Goeth, can you imagine!!!” After around of laughter, Tsipi showed a video of her meeting withGoeth’s daughter, and at 4 a.m., all left the House.32

Discussion: Memory work at the House of Being

If serious humor saturates everyday life at the House of Be-ing, the vigil presents even more blatant forms of blasphe-mous satire and carnivalesque reversal of hegemonic mem-ory work. The event prompts the questions posed aboveregarding the irreverent juxtaposition of humor and sanc-tified commemoration, but it also raises new questions.Why would descendants hold an all-night vigil to satirizecommemorative practice? Why, of all times, on HolocaustMemorial Eve and why, of all places, in the heritage roomamong the living dead? Can this final event shed light onthe use of humor as cultural mechanism and on the coexis-tence of life- and deathworlds at the House?33

Joking behavior at the House, as in other supportivegroup settings (Pollner and Stein 2001), may provide cathar-tic relief, releasing built-up tensions and facilitating the ex-pression of repressed issues.34 However, in contrast to siteswhere humor plays only a supplementary role to psychoso-cial or nostalgic narratives, in the House humor is a dom-inant mechanism, central to almost every speech act. Asseen in Tsipi’s plea to the descendant who resisted humorand in the defense of humor in response to the teacher, hu-mor has a purgative effect, but theories of catharsis cannotsufficiently explain the ludic framing at the House.

The vigil is certainly a carnivalesque ritual of rever-sal (Babcock 1978), as evident in the unabashed renaming

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of Holocaust Memorial Day as Holocaust Holiday. The re-sponse to the teacher verifies that the event’s timing andlocation are conscious reversals of the national social or-der. The reversal of roles of hegemonically valorized parti-san fighters and stigmatized sheep–passive survivors (andPolish or Hungarian and Greek survivors) is a recurrent pat-tern. Beyond reversal, joking behavior recalls carnivalesquegrotesque improvisational banter. Descendants irreverentlypoke fun at sacrosanct survivors (as fried or barbecuedmeat), at iconic symbols of suffering (potato peels), at cul-tural idioms of suffering (kindling salvaged from fire), andat commemorative practices (museum reenactments). Corecomponents of national master narratives and embeddedhierarchies that deride passive capitulation in favor of com-bative bravery (components still so central to contemporarystate hegemonic precepts) are also satirized and therebycensured. Israeli mainstream society and the survivor in-group are satirized for constructing a hierarchy of survivorsuffering. Psychological discourse and practice are also par-odied. Descendants perform confessional narratives only tobe ribbed, ranked, and often silenced in the midst of their“talk therapy.” Participants partake in self-parody whencomparing their srita (Heb. emotional “scratch” or wound).The final blow to psychological discourse is the double-edged reference to humor itself as an intergenerationallytransmitted “symptom,” which playfully derides the con-struct of generationally transmitted PTSD and legitimatesludic behavior.

Joking behavior at the House, in general, and vigil di-alogue, in particular, are also acts of resistance to conven-tional testimonial practice, therapeutic practice, and na-tional hegemonic hierarchies, engendering in their steadan alternative form of “local memory work.” In contrast tothose who offer testimony in conventional hegemonic sitesand who produce therapeutic trauma narratives, descen-dants at the House do not tell a linear history of the sur-vivor’s past or of their own childhood past. Descendant corenarratives depict, instead, only discrete emotive momentsthat conjure the unique feeling tone of survivor lifeworlds,devoid of the historiography characteristic of monumen-tal settings. These moments and relations are not framedas symptoms of PTSD-related transmitted dysfunction, asemotional burdens, or even as a legacy of suffering but,rather, as the normative and intimate experience of sur-vivor family life. In great contrast to national hegemonictestimonies deriding the survivor, glorifying the state as re-deemer, or embedding militant messages, descendant corenarratives end by highlighting the heroism of parental “pas-sive” endurance, resilience, and even humor. In their hu-morous, self-deprecating references to their own “touched”selves, descendants do not blame parents or seek psycho-logical healing but merely trace a generational connectionvia shared emotional markers. As powerfully seen in Tsipi’sfinal tale, rather than calling for liberation from the bur-

densome past, separation–individuation from the parent,or enlistment in monumental commemorative projects,descendants perform their own alternative commemora-tion.35 Their alternative, like Tsipi’s pedagogic raison d’etre,is the recollection of loving and proud embraces of sur-vivors (despite shared wounds) and the resultant restora-tion of ruptured generational ties that might facilitate anemotive containment of a “living” Holocaust past—in thedescendant self, in the House, and in the wider collective.

Why, then, do they not merely recount the emotive mo-ments of their childhood, praise their parents’ heroic sur-vival, and openly challenge conventional discourse? Whatis the contribution of serious humor? Terrence Des Presprovides an insightful reading of Holocaust humor, assert-ing that, whereas “tragedy is mimetic of tragic events, af-firming the authority of their existence, elevating what is”(1988:220), the comic mocks what is, deflating its author-ity. Monumental memory work elevates not only the tragicHolocaust past but also the messages embedded in its en-listed narratives and representations. In contrast, as echoedin the vigil’s satire of national Holocaust “etiquette,” the lu-dic representation of events is “hostile to the world depict-ing and subverting the reverential manner on which rep-resentation depends” (Des Pres 1988:219). Des Pres assertsthat, as carnival laughter revolts against solemn hierarchi-cal order, it draws “from a utopian hunger” containing a“fearless affirmation of life . . . celebrating the regenerativepowers of life in the face of death” (1988:223). It is preciselythe fusion of death with life that engenders the possibil-ity of a “renegade” lifeworld that replenishes the social or-der from “a communal underlife.”36 Des Pres’s reading ofcarnivalesque resistance facilitates a more profound under-standing of serious humor (and everyday life) at the Houseas a manifestation of the renegade spirit of survivor fami-lies. Serious renegade humor not only allows for phoenix-like resilience but also revivifies hegemonic memory workfrom the “communal underlife” of the House’s marginalyet still consequential position within the wider Israelicommemorative landscape. Resistance, then, to main-stream commemoration is reconfigured as a potentiallyconstructive, rather than a subversively deconstructive,process.

Although born of survivor renegade life, the House (asTsipi’s creation) and the vigil (as descendant memory work)nonetheless constitute what James E. Young (1998:699)might term the “afterlife” of memory. As Young demon-strates in his analysis of Art Spiegelman’s (1968) Mauscomics—the Holocaust allegory replete with Nazi cats andJewish mice through which Spiegelman’s father related hisown Holocaust tale—children of survivors cannot remem-ber the past “outside of the way it was passed down to them”(1998:698). Their own sense of narcissism, their position-ing of themselves center stage, ambiguously accompaniestheir charity toward the survivor and their embrace of their

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legacy. The vigil may be understood as a wakeful and devo-tional watch over the emergence of their own very presentempathic memory of parental suffering and resilient famil-ial ties, at the same time that they also await the crystalliza-tion of their own commemorative agenda and social status.All of these factors are ambiguously positioned—distancedfrom and at times at odds with the survivor lifeworld—but are still in conflict with hegemonic Holocaust represen-tations. In the absence of authentic memory or immedi-acy, descendants celebrate what Young terms (1998:670) the“mediacy” of the Holocaust past as transmitted–mediatedexperience. As ways of defining this legacy, caricature, ex-aggeration, and irony interrogate the ambiguity and contra-diction of mainstream categories (Lambek 2003), betweenwhat is accepted and rejected in the hegemonic and what isauthentic and fabricated, so that descendants may reposi-tion themselves vis-a-vis the survivor source and the collec-tive domain.

It is also serious humor that best grapples with the am-biguities and contradictions that riddle even the descen-dants’ resistant alternative. One might ask, is the descen-dant an authentic Holocaust witness or merely a witnessonce removed? If a descendant vicariously experienced thepast in early sensuous moments, as Tsipi did, then can thatindividual be seen as having “experienced” the Holocaust?If the person did experience the emotive traces of the past,then does he or she authentically carry that past? If the per-son does, can he or she authentically commemorate thatpast? Beyond authenticity, Holocaust discursive frames andcommemorative practice present other ambiguities. Con-temporary discursive frames pathologize, stigmatize, rank,and deprecate survivor parents’ experience and descen-dants’ own childhood experience and are incommensuratewith children’s more ambivalent experience of their parents’well-being and their own emotional health. Are they proudor ashamed of their parents? How can they proudly relatethe tale of their parents’ separation from family memberswhen Israeli discourse labels such tragic events instances of“sheeplike cowardice”? How can they recount dysfunctionalparenting without psychologically stigmatizing themselvesand their family?

At the heart of descendant commemorative practicelies the final paradox of its relation to public Holocaustpresence and absence. If descendants agree to carry famil-ial memory, will they not be eventually called on to relievetheir private burden by relinquishing it to a psychosocial ormonumental public commemorative site? If descendantsperformed private memory in the public domain, would itremain intimate “living” family property or would it be ap-propriated into the collective whole of “dead memory” andreinterpreted in the language of suffering and stigma? De-spite their apparent challenge to mainstream commemo-ration, at the heart of the vigil’s and the House’s endeavorlies the contradictory reality that descendants are publicly

commemorating the past (as their events are open to thepublic) albeit in a resistant form and with resistant content.Thus, the above ambiguities raise the question, can mem-ory be both resistant and enlisted, valorous and shameful,therapeutic and pathologizing, living and dead, private andpublic?

I propose that humor is used here as an exploratorybridge into and out of paradox-ridden descendant self-hood, legacy, and commemorative carrier status. Humor ex-plores, holds congruent, and enables one to live with (orbe with) multiple contradictory dualities (Lachmann 1988–89:124). The dynamics of play at the heart of humor accesstacit experiences while reconciling the paradoxes of au-thenticity, survivor-family stigmatization, and descendantcarrier status. From the liminal position of paradox, fromthe point of “yes and no,” play opens a “passage” throughwhich the player is propelled into an alternative reality inwhich contradictory paradoxes may be temporarily recon-ciled (Bateson 1972; Handelman 1992).37 From their liminalposition as authentic and inauthentic, valorized and stig-matized, and well and ill, descendants may playfully satirizeall that is sacrosanct (Kidron 2006). By playfully juggling thedualities of their Holocaust experience, they propel them-selves into the childhood and parental past, which theycan recount from “within” their experience. Having hu-morously deconstructed deprecating and univocal discur-sive frames, they create alternative family-specific meaningworlds that signify pride and shame, emotional wound andstrength, and backward- and forward-looking familial links,worlds that are now viable despite their ultimate ambiva-lence. The juxtaposition of playful parody and intimate nar-ratives functions as a riddle does (Handelman 1996), posi-tioning incongruent realities side by side to provide a spacewhere ambivalence, duality, and paradox may be exploredand tolerated as copresent.38

Joking behavior at the end of the descendant narrativeis as important as the opening humorous frame. As one de-scendant explained, “The jokes help us get back into ourpast, but they also help us get out again.” Just as move-ment in and out of the House and in and out of the livingroom does, humor allows movement in and out of the pastso that it may be at once accessible, temporarily copresent,and sufficiently commensurate to be recounted while stillallowing one to “march forward into the future.” It is pre-cisely in the cotemporal chronotopic space of the living–heritage room that Tsipi humorously moves descendantsin and out of their familial pasts. Echoing their paradoxicalpasts, the room weaves the past ruptured life- and death-world into the present mundane lifeworld, creating a reani-mated copresence.39

The agenda, decor, praxis, talk, and ludic genre of theHouse juxtapose incommensurate dualities. The significa-tions of past–present, life–death, and mundane–profane areset up side by side to facilitate fluid movement between

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the “absent” temporal–spatial and visceral experience of theprewar lifeworld and deathworld and the present. This du-ality and movement utilize the same logic that humor doesin juxtaposing the dualities of descendant experience. Byallowing descendants to perform their paradoxical selves,the House permits them to “be and live with” these dual-ities and with the copresence of the past and present. Inthe House, both a copy of all absent houses and a containerof cotemporal presence, where literal and figurative move-ment enables envelopment of the past, the descendant mayhold at bay otherwise untenable contradictions.

Despite the virtual cotemporality of past–present anddeath–life at the House, the site is nonetheless fully en-gaged in everyday reality–actuality. In contrast to conven-tional readings of ritual, the activation of copresence at theHouse is not conditional on discrete ritual boundaries orthe autonomy of ritual praxis (Handelman 1990). Instead,virtuality is maintained precisely by the perpetual poros-ity of House borders, by the seepage of mundane presentdaily life and the entry of nonsurvivors into the House.The virtuality of the living presence of the past is sustainedby mundane interaction with surviving artifacts that re-sist the pastness and the status of commemorative displayby functionally and aesthetically remaining embedded ina domestic setting still very much in use (Kravel and Bilu2008).40 It is in this dual context of mundane and intimatedomestic–geriatric center and sacred public pedagogic cen-ter that copresence engenders a lived experience of thepast and facilitates Halbwachs’s conceptualization of a livedmemory intertwined in the dynamic social milieu of every-day life. This juxtaposition of lifeworlds–deathworlds, andmundane–ritual practice, calls for a reformulation of schol-arly understanding of how, where, and to what end com-memorative practice is undertaken and what qualifies as aritual of memory or as memory itself.41

Beyond the passage into the virtual past, the Housealso facilitates the passage over a concrete sociopoliticalthreshold, namely, from the private–domestic “silent” do-main into the meso–public domain of testimonial voice.For the majority of members interviewed, the House is thefirst and only place in which they have given voice to theHolocaust past and shared their tales with others.42 It is alsothe only sanctuary where material traces of pre-Holocaustdomesticity may be revivified by a loving gaze or touch,having made a parallel passage from hidden drawers to a“domestic” living-room wall, where they are positioned am-biguously in the public sphere.43 It would thus seem that bycreating a more intimate communal “home” for the virtualliving presence of the past (as a viable alternative to testi-mony or display in monumental sites), Tsipi and others likeher are facilitating a dialogue between those who were pre-viously silent and the Israeli visiting public. As Olick andRobbins (1998) point out, local countermemory interpen-etrates creatively with hegemonic landscapes. As long as

House visitors are willing to interact with survivors and thepast on Tsipi’s transgressive terms, and to walk a tightropewith her between local countermemory and “making do”(Roseman 1996) with the benefits of partial public enlist-ment and accommodation, Tsipi will contribute to the na-tional commemorative landscape.

Tsipi’s long-term agenda is to “shake up” a growingnumber of visitors, progressively impacting the statist com-memorative landscape and even fostering national human-ist policies from below. As attested to by the small metalmemorial plaques recently attached to the “living photos”on the wall (reading “Blessed be their memory”), however,Tsipi and her survivors may be paying a price for increas-ing involvement in Israel’s memory industry. Although theuse of serious humor allows members to expose incon-gruities between the private lived experience and nationaldiscourse and practice and also guarantees their renegadeposition on the borderland between these worlds, increasedmedia attention, national and municipal governmentalsupport, and the growing number of consumers seeking in-novative Holocaust representation serve to bring these dis-tant worlds into closer encounters of the kind that may ul-timately compromise the House’s unique spirit. It remainsto be seen if Tsipi’s renegade form of commemoration willresist “fall[ing] into structure” (Turner 1969) or if, even inthe best of times of postmodern multiplicity, inviting Holo-caust consumers into the “privacy” of the House of Beingto commemorate with her will ultimately lead to further ca-pitulation, collective enlistment, and even nationalization.Perhaps in the ludic spirit of paradox and ambiguity, Tsipiand her volunteers will continue to do both—to resist andcapitulate. A growing number of genocide survivor–refugeeenclaves around the globe are spontaneously forming sitesof communal living memory or are enlisted to do so byNGOs, truth commissions, or mental health professionals.How they situate themselves in their respective hegemoniclandscapes should be fascinating to observe.

The House also problematizes the assumptions of the“crisis of representation” that many associate with the Holo-caust. Although relatives are clearly deceased and photo-graphic images and material traces of the Holocaust pastare, in fact, detached from their original living contexts,scholarly conceptualizations of the limits of representationand fabricated authenticity underestimate the revivifyingforce of “living” contexts that undertake emotive or ludicmemory work. Within the living context, participants maybe ushered across porous boundaries into a space wherethey experience not the fabricated representation of thepast but the very “real” ambiguity of the liminal repres-ence of that past and the ambivalence of their personalbond with and commitment to it. Old and new museol-ogy also aims to manipulate contexts that frame strategi-cally constructed simulations and vicarious identity work,but these contexts remain devoid of a living experience or a

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personally salient sense of humorous ambiguity. At bestrepresenting or reenacting previously lived experience, theymaintain the gap between participants’ present lifeworldand the distant past, failing in Tsipi’s terms to “shake up”and enrich the visitor.

As the House appears to normalize the presence of thedead and the traces of the traumatically ruptured past with-out evoking sorrowful mourning, its study problematizesWestern “death work.” Mainstream commemorative prac-tice not only sequesters the dead from everyday life, polic-ing the boundaries of what therapeutic discourse has de-termined to be normative brief periods of mourning but italso marks the absolute separation of the living from deadloved ones to create closure with respect to personal andcollective benign or traumatic pasts. The juxtaposition ofthe living and the dead at the House implies that the phe-nomenological experience of trauma, mourning, and lossmay leave room for a far more fluid and nonpathologicalmovement between the living and the dead they remember,and between everyday experience and the surviving tracesof the past. From the perspective of House members, if thedead and their lifeworlds are not culturally “absenced”—not lost to the cemetery or relegated to frozen monumen-tal institutions—their absence need not be mourned but,rather, their presence may be celebrated.44

The normalization of death work entails implicationsregarding the illness and wellness of victims of traumaticloss. In light of descendants’ parody of transmitted PTSDand their lay self-diagnosis as “touched,” one might criti-cally ask if trauma-related therapeutic discourse and prac-tice have not hastened to pathologize rather than explorealternative yet normative survivor–descendant lifeworldsgenerated by the unique experience of genocide. Consid-ering the fun-loving embrace and familial containment ofsurvivors at the House, this case study calls on scholars toconsider the efficacy of alternative cultural practices thatpromote healing and wellness.

Finally, this case study raises questions regarding theoften-overshadowed phenomenon of serious humor and itscore components of ambiguity and paradox. Further ethno-graphic examination of the role of humor in identity workmay contribute to a more profound understanding of lim-inal states, boundary work, hybridity, and emergent sub-jectivities. An exploration of play-related behavior amongthose who are destined to exist on the border would shedlight on identity work that aims not to resolve or transcendambiguity but, rather, to creatively “be and live with” the in-herent contradictions of everyday life.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I am most indebted to Tsipi Kichler andall the members and visitors at the House of Being for allow-

ing me to “play” with and be moved by them. I would like tothank Don Handelman, Yoram Bilu, Haim Hazan, Jackie Feldman,Erica Lehrer, Einat Bar-On Cohen, Michael Lambek, Paul Antze, Al-lan Young, Laurence Kirmayer, Tamar Katriel, Avi Shoshana, GioraKidron, and Janet Carsten for their enriching conversations andcritical comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous re-viewers and Linda Forman for their contribution to the manuscript.While initially formulating this article, I enjoyed the generous fund-ing of the Halbert Exchange Program (for Israeli–Canadian Cooper-ation); the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and MentalHealth Services and the Division of Transcultural Psychiatry, McGillUniversity; and the Morris Ginsberg Foundation, Hebrew Univer-sity of Jerusalem.

1. Management, staff, and members do not refer to the Houseof Being as a museum, memorial site, or even geriatric center, al-though it does perform the functions of each of these institutions.In an interview, House founder and manager Tsipi Kichler outlinedher dislike of the narrow and what she thought of as the stigmaticinstitutional identity of a geriatric center. She and the staff occa-sionally refer to the site as a pedagogic center. However, on thewhole, all those affiliated with the site refer to it as the “House” orthe “House of Being,” and the ambivalent and multifaceted insti-tutional “identity” of the site is part and parcel of its uniqueness.In response to anonymous reviewer comments and popular con-ceptions of the aged (Hazan 1994), I use the term geriatric center.House of Being is my working translation of the Hebrew Beit Lehiot.The Babylon online Hebrew–English dictionary gives the follow-ing translation of lehiot: “verb—to be, exist, be present and nounform—being.” I asked House members and volunteers to explainthe significance of the name of the site. Their responses, that theyexperienced the House as a sanctuary in which they could “be” whothey were, as survivors, in ways they could not “be” elsewhere, I felt,clearly pointed to existential questions—namely, issues of survivor-hood and the nature and quality of life after survival—which justifymy use of the word being.

2. Tsipi has requested that I use her name in all publications.3. The dense layout of photos recalled Yaffa Eliach’s installation

of photographs of Holocaust victims in the United States Holo-caust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, entitled “The Towerof Life.” Yet, in contrast to the signification of death in the museumphotos, the association of the photos at the House of Being, giventhe absence of references to genocide, death, and suffering in the“living room” space, was one of domestic family nostalgia. Theyrecalled Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) description of domestic photo-graphic narratives above a mantel or along a staircase—chroniclingthe fondly remembered yet taken-for-granted family past that istightly interwoven into the hearth of domestic practice. Accordingto Hirsch, such a display acts as a mundane albeit meaningful back-drop to everyday life, as the family’s self-representation of its ownconstitutive history.

4. I thank an anonymous reviewer for formulating the relation-ship in this way, which perfectly captures the heart of the process.

5. Stephan Feuchtwang (2007) describes the way the Jewish pastremains present or absent in the lives of those of mixed descent andthe way such individuals create lines of kinship and belonging inthe face of wartime disruption. His nonethnographic study focuses,however, not on the everyday, mundane presence of the past inter-woven in the domestic sphere or communal public site of mem-ory but, rather, on the way in which what he terms the “lived self”(Feuchtwang 2007:170) idiosyncratically draws the lines of complexheritage as part of identity work.

6. Classic ethnographies of local memory include Herzfeld 1991and Seremetakis 1994 on Greek memory, Swedenburg 1989 onPalestinian memory, and Cattell and Climo 2002 on Holocaust

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memory. I refer here not only to genocidal memory but also to theenlistment of personal memory and the gap between the personaland the national. Wilson 2001 provides a fascinating account of theenlistment of testimony before truth commissions in South Africaand the tensions that arise around competing religious–culturalconceptions of justice.

7. The appeal to humor in response to death and dying is, ofcourse, culturally pervasive (Narvaez 2003). For a general overviewof humor in ritual, see Apte 1985, which explains how and why rit-ual provides opportunity to laugh at forbidden topics. See Thursby2006 for an examination of how humor fills gaps in ambivalentsituations—of tension, anxiety, and formality during funeral festi-vals in the United States, including those related to the Day of theDead. However, as Stanley Brandes (2003) notes, this kind of fu-nerary humor is ephemeral and is rarely the key rhetorical genreof the event. Although less pervasive, even personal and collectivetraumatic death engenders gallows humor and “disaster jokes,” de-spite, as Peter Narvaez (2003) points out, the shocking nature of theambiguity and the poor taste. I do not attempt to demonstrate the“novelty” of ludic behavior as a response to traumatic death anddying but, rather, to explore the far more unusual and intriguinguse of humor as key genre within permanent (and not ephemeral)genocidal commemorative sites and ongoing practices.

8. Until the 1980s, the attribution Holocaust survivors (and its laydefinition and understanding) in Israel and North America signi-fied those who were incarcerated in death or concentration campsor in forced labor camps, who were confined in ghettos, or whowere driven into hiding in extreme conditions of isolation and fac-ing the imminent threat of death. With the shift in Israeli Holo-caust discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, and concomitant growinginterest in and valorization of noncombatant Holocaust survivor-hood and victimhood, the social classification of the survivor wasexpanded to include those who were not incarcerated, ghettoized,or forced into hiding but who, nonetheless suffered forced flight–migration or forced adoption–conversion while remaining withinNazi occupied territory from 1933 to 1945. This expanded defini-tion vastly increased the number of Holocaust survivors and de-scendants in Israel and abroad. The attribution Holocaust descen-dants in Israel refers to either children or grandchildren of one ormore Holocaust survivors (broadly defined). When planning mywider research project (Kidron 2005), I utilized more conserva-tive criteria of survivorhood—interviewing only those whose par-ents were in camps, in ghettos, or in hiding—to access data witha narrower experiential foundation that is unequivocally valorizedby a broad base in Israeli society and because such descendantsare assumed to have been exposed to what is still culturally de-fined as a highly “traumatic” legacy, regardless of the diversity of vi-able familial responses. The academic literature and some popularcultural references in Israel and elsewhere haphazardly utilize theattributions trauma survivors and descendants when referring toindividuals or groups whose very distant ancestors (multiple gener-ations removed) experienced the traumatic event, sometimes with-out attempting to trace the processes of transmission or the natureof the resultant legacy. For a discussion of the question of socialclassification of survivorhood, see Danieli 1998 and Berger 1997.Holocaust survivors and children of survivors are particularly sen-sitive to the attribution of survivorhood to those who have not suf-fered the more extreme conditions outlined above.

9. Although the term memory work has been used in the litera-ture to refer to various therapeutic or sociopolitical forms of workon or with memory, my understanding and use of the term in thepresent study emerges from Michael Lambek and Paul Antze’s pio-neering volume Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory(1996), whose contributors explore the cultural processes, prac-

tices, and identities emerging from personal and collective memo-ries of trauma. In that volume, memory work refers to the culturallymediated practices of personal and collective remembering andhow they are constituted and invoked. Lambek and Antze unpackthe term when outlining the difficult hermeneutic distinction at theheart of their volume between “memory as unmediated fact or pro-cess” and “the culturally mediated acts, schemata and stories—thememory work—that comprise our memories and the way we thinkabout them” (1996:xv; emphasis added).

10. My personal background as a child of Holocaust survivors fa-cilitated backstage access to House activities, and I myself felt verymuch at “home” at the center.

11. Tsipi is divorced and the mother of two grown children, oneof whom spends time at the House, chatting with survivors and de-scendants and singing and performing with the survivor choir. Alsogifted with a sense of humor, he often picks up on his mother’s one-liners and continues her humorous improvisation.

12. Tsipi formulated, designed, and produced honorary cer-tificates that were given to Holon’s survivors at the House’s firstHolocaust ceremony. The central design of these “Certificates ofLove” is a blooming mustard plant with a butterfly pollinating oneof its flowers. The text of the certificate reads,

Granted to:Holocaust survivor, resident of Holon in the State of IsraelFor the rehabilitation of life and establishment of family to-ward the continuation of the Jewish People in their State. Weview this as a great human achievement and we salute you.

The certificate is signed “the Mayor.” On the top of it is the logoof the city of Holon encaptioned “The Ministry of Education andCulture, the Department of Communal Centers and Youth.” Thebutterfly and plant motif has become the House’s logo, a partialappropriation of another heritage museum’s symbol of survival inthe ghetto and labor camps. The key valorized theme of the certifi-cate is clearly the importance of restoring respect for the survivor.The metatext is pointedly the revision of the concept of “heroism,”as encompassing not only the more frequently recognized act ofperseverance but also the rehabilitation of one’s life and the estab-lishment of a family serving the Jewish people and the state. Thistext both presents subversive reformulations of grand narrativesand channels the “restored” survivor into the service of hegemonicnational dictates. The municipality of Holon also created a certifi-cate for presentation to “Righteous Gentiles,” non-Jews who riskedtheir lives to save House members. It reads, “We in Holon recognizeand value the greatness of your acts to save Jews while endanger-ing your lives and the lives of your family during the years of theSecond World War.” Below is a picture of a hand holding a plantseedling sprouting out of black earth. Next to the picture, the textreads, “To your height perhaps we will not reach but we will walk inyour path.”

13. Tsipi and volunteers alike seem aware of the apparent para-dox in this approach or, at least, of the deviation from the normthat pedagogy is didactic—that teaching involves imparting posi-tivist knowledge rather than just emotive responses to the past. Asa first-generation volunteer told me, “This is an educational insti-tution, we don’t teach Shoah here. We feel Shoah through the per-sonal story, the live testimony.”

14. Municipal and national governmental support has includedmonetary backing and has also provided the site with the legiti-macy necessary to attract VIP visitors, school day trips, and mediacoverage, all of which are highly important to Tsipi and her staff.Tsipi is paid by the municipal board of education for her work at the

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House. This support, however, has required her to partially accom-modate her practices to the mainstream commemorative canon, asI detail subsequently in the text. Tsipi’s tricksterlike strategic ma-neuvering along the tightrope between accommodation and resis-tance came up frequently in my interviews and casual conversa-tions with her, but, for obvious ethical reasons, I cannot disclosespecific comments.

15. The House of Being has “adopted” a number of RighteousGentiles and their families, some of whom have emigrated toIsrael. Some of these individuals volunteer regularly at the House,and Tsipi and the other members make it a point to ensure that theyfeel just as much at home there as the survivors.

16. Since my first visit (2004), more families have added memo-rial plaques to their photos, and a few more conventional Holo-caust artifacts have been brought in by survivors and placed on dis-play in the “heritage” room (e.g., a sweater knitted in a ghetto anda time line depicting Holocaust history from 1933 to the establish-ment of the state in 1948). It is difficult to determine if these addi-tions reflect acquiescence to hegemonic commemorative practicesor an internal House decision not to decline any request by sur-vivors to display their mementos. My attempt to bring the subjectof the plaques to the attention of Tsipi and other volunteers hasevoked confusion and at times even denial that a shift in practicehas occurred.

17. Considering that Tsipi makes frequent subversive referencesto the idiom “sheep to the slaughter,” the display of the bustis ironic, as Abba Kovner, the individual represented, coined thephrase to describe survivors and thereby glorify his fellow partisanfighters who did not passively acquiesce.

18. The House of Being is almost devoid of dark-touristic images(Lennon and Foley 2000). Thus, the exhibition of hundreds of pre-war photos without accompanying death-related imagery allowsthe visitor to experience the prewar past in a nonmournful manner,perhaps without explicitly signifying death and the destruction offamily frameworks and communities. The nostalgic heritage framerather than the mournful commemorative frame is more in keep-ing with Tsipi’s agenda of creating an embracing and fun familialliving space for survivor leisure time.

19. See Carsten 2007:18 for a discussion of the power of domesticfurnishings that integrate the past and the present to allow memorywork to be both regressive and regenerative.

20. See Chaitin and Steinberg 2008 for an interesting discussionof Holocaust memory and empathy in Israeli society.

21. See Bakhtin 1981 for discussion of a chronotope as a time–space matrix.

22. The survivors and their families do not require photographicrepresentation or documentary evidence of the horrors of Shoahto evoke their otherwise distant dead (Handelman and ShamgarHandelman 1997). See Young 1990 for discussions on HolocaustMemorial Day practices and Handelman and Shamgar Handelman1997 for a discussion of degrees of absence and the challenge ofcommemoration. The ceremony at the House is filmed for inter-nal use; Tsipi adds the film to her stock of public-relations mate-rials, to show to visitors, on trips to Germany, and also to Housemembers.

23. A number of important ethnographies discuss the ritualpresence of the dead among the living. Battaglia 1992 discusses thesegaiya exchange in Papua New Guinea, specifically, the use of mor-tuary objects to represent the “presence in absentia” of the deadand the practices of secondary burial that mark the importanceof family relations while simultaneously facilitating the cessationof obligations and death-related limitations. In that case, as in theHouse, the past is embedded in relations and in artifacts. Lambek1996 discusses a case in Madagascar in which the presence of the

dead is ritually embodied by the living in periodic ceremonies. Incontrast, I assert that, at the House, memory preserves a permanentalbeit virtual presence rather than ritually containing or limiting achronotopic presence.

24. The term night vigil (Heb. leil-shmurim) is borrowed fromthe religious practice of studying the Torah and other Judaic textsall night on the eve of the holiday of Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks,which celebrates the handing down of the Torah at Mt. Sinai andthe transformation of the Jewish people into a nation. As the as-sociation implies, descendants at the House of Being anticipate adevotional vigil and formative event.

25. Shnitzolim may also imply the consumption and embodi-ment of survivors prior to their demise to allow for the passing ofthe torch to descendants (personal communication Erica Lehrer,December 15, 2008).

26. This interaction between Tsipi and the last remaining sur-vivors in the room discloses underlying intergenerational tensionsand competition between survivors, as authentic sources of testi-monial legitimacy (and of transmitted wounds), and members ofthe second generation, who are presently in the process of form-ing their own no less legitimate place in the commemorative pan-theon. Paradoxically, as loving container of memory, the House isdependent precisely on the restoration of ruptured ties that facil-itate its transmission, and Tsipi, in particular, has made her markon the national landscape as embracing the degraded and silencedsurvivor. See Tamar Katriel’s insightful analysis of how a kibbutzsettlement museum becomes “an enclave where intergenerationaltensions can be simultaneously articulated and smoothed out inperformative acts of narration” (1997:74).

27. For a comprehensive review of the literature on trauma, seeKirmayer et al. 2007. For a critical deconstructivist approach toPTSD, see Young 1995. For a review of the psychological literatureon intergenerationally transmitted PTSD, see Danieli 1998.

28. Although Greek Jews were commonly partisans, many whowere incarcerated in concentration camps were given one of themost horrific jobs there—serving as Sondercomando, shovelingbodies into the crematorium.

29. Clearly, the House and the Holocaust Memorial Eve event be-come an occasion to explore and resist multiple hegemonic dis-courses and reified hierarchies that subjugate those on the bottomof the Israeli social ladder (Goodman and Mizrachi 2008). Here theGreek Sepharadi (Jew of oriental descent) critiques the Ashkenazi(Jews of European descent) regarding their monopoly over Holo-caust discourse and practice, silencing the less baleful expressions,yet no less tragic experiences, of the Greek, Bulgarian, and Libyanpast.

30. Many descendants approached me for more information re-garding my research, and about half of the participants asked to beinterviewed, usually accompanying the request with a joke abouttheir “being especially touched.”

31. Tsipi’s role as a symbolic type, taken for granted as condens-ing the meaning of the site and its processes and thereby wieldinggreat power over participants, is central to her achievement.

32. See Lehrer 2007 for an enlightening account and analysisof the interdependency between the Polish non-Jew in postwarPoland and the visiting Jewish tourist, as together they weave theiridentities through morally loaded, ambivalent interaction.

33. Almost all my attempts to question Tsipi or participants re-garding the meaning of joking behavior at the House evoked re-sponses such as “Should I cry instead?” or “What’s wrong withhumor?”

34. Literature on humor during the Holocaust also highlights thetherapeutic effect of joking behavior (Des Pres 1988; Lipman 1991).Exploring the retention of humor in the worst of conditions may

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be seen as part of the trend to widen the thematics of Holocaustrepresentation and commemoration. Rather than focusing only onsuffering and loss, literature, museum exhibits, and even film nowhighlight the positive life-giving potential of art, play, and humor.This upbeat theme, however, has not made it into monumentalcommemoration.

35. Even the Holocaust theater established by Tsipi and per-formed by three generations of three local families (the “Testimonyof Three Generations”) does not in any way perform Holocausthistory or “train” descendants to testify to the Holocaust past. In-stead, echoing all House activity, survivors testify to the love andredemption they found in their families and in House relations,and descendants testify to the importance of intergenerational ties,mutual support, and respect for survivor parents and grandparents.Tsipi herself emphasizes these ideals in her testimony at the Holo-caust Eve ceremony, calling on participants to carry an emotivememory of the past and the dead in their hearts rather than car-rying a historical tale that might be disseminated and performedpublicly. Even survivor testimonies at the House before schoolchil-dren do not pedagogically disseminate history (as Tsipi herself ex-plains) but, rather, engineer emotive and empathic relations withthe past and with the survivors of that past and work toward thedissemination of moral messages of empathy and humanism.

36. However, unlike the “temporary anti-world” of Des Pres’s(1988) theater productions and literary works, life and humor atthe House of Being are part of a permanent site perpetually feed-ing mainstream visitors from without.

37. This recalls Norman K. Denzin’s (1993) and Melvin Pollnerand Jill Stein’s (2001) findings that ludic behavior at AlcoholicsAnonymous meetings facilitates “doubling,” or the creation of adual position on the border, from which the speaker may reflexivelyrelate his or her difficult past while commenting on it from the in-congruent present position of the critical and recovered alcoholic.As Pollner and Stein state, the experience of narration is not merelycathartic or didactic for the speaker and the audience but, rather,is transformative, allowing all in the group to move into and out oftheir painful pasts from a new reflexive stance.

38. Recalling Michael F. Brown’s (1996) critique of ethnographiesof resistance, I assert that failure to explore the cultural processesembedded in serious humor as a key mechanism of resistancewould elide the subtle ambiguity of descendant identity and mem-ory work, which enables House members to juggle their embrace ofand accommodation to personal and collective legacies with theiropposition to them.

39. Although I have argued against classifying the room sim-ply as a Holocaust memorial exhibit, that is one of its functions.Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (1998) reading of such displays isparticularly cogent. She asserts that “exhibits do for themselveswhat the lifeworld cannot do for itself by bringing together arte-facts never found in the same place at the same time and show-ing relationships that cannot otherwise be seen” (1998:169). As sug-gested by the visiting families gazing together at the mass of photosof their animated–deceased relatives on Holocaust Memorial Eveand by descendants playfully articulating otherwise tacit “relation-ships” while completely surrounded by the photos–artifacts fromthe past, the alternative lifeworld at the House of Being seems toemerge from the density of presence not found outside the House.This density shows familial relationships and temporal relation-ships “otherwise not seen.” Yet I would claim that the paradox ofdomesticity and publicity and of mundane and sacred in the Houseas quasi-home creates a more intimate and vital space than the mu-seum offers, allowing for the experience of these relationships to besustained for a much longer period of time than the average mu-seum visit does. In addition, the experience is not passively under-

taken, as occurs when one tours or even interacts with exhibits ina museum. I would claim this is why one respondent asserted thatthe House is not a museum and that a survivor asserted it was nota cemetery but the “House that was destroyed and burnt.”

40. Scholars offer multiple readings of the terms and experiencesof virtuality and actuality. Bruce Kapferer (1997) asserts that ritu-als may at once condense the indeterminacy of the everyday life-world but allow for the imposition of control and ultimately deter-ministic boundaries in which transformation may occur. Ritual, forKapferer, thus remains a virtual rendition of the actual, despite thetotality and boundedness of the event. In contrast, in the House,the commemorative vigil and playful and ambiguous daily life alsoallow for movement between the mundane and the sacred, be-tween transgressive humor and valorized remembrance. Thus, theboundary is blurred between the virtuality of the presence of thepast (and the dead) and the actuality of the absence of past (anddeath).

41. Victor W. Turner’s (1974) conceptualizations of the liminal–liminoid may provide insight into the passage into the space,and the lived experience of being, betwixt and between past andpresent and life and death with all its indeterminacy, processuality,loosening of limits around identity, relaxed behavior, and perhapseven certain components of communitas. However, the House de-parts from this conception in important ways. First, everyday lifenever ceases to saturate almost all of the most intense ritual mo-ments, so that one may not really speak of an entirely alternative orbounded temporal–spatial ritual experience. Second, although theconcept of “liminoid” may be helpful when considering members’transgressive behavior, emerging continuously on the margins ofthe social order, House “ritual” behavior, hierarchy, and even hu-mor retain clear links to everyday structure. Finally, far from thesocial leveling of communitas (from even normative communitas),the often tense survivor–descendant relations and competitive in-terdescendant ethnic–historical relations, epitomized in Tsipi’s hi-erarchy of Polish versus Hungarian or Greek suffering, are antithet-ical to Turner’s ideal.

42. Despite the great increase in the number of testimonies pro-vided by survivors in the public domain (since the Eichmann trial),the majority of survivors resist participation in public forms ofcommemoration.

43. As I expand on in a broader study of survivor and descendantcommemorative practices (Kidron 2005), the very great majority ofthe 55 Israeli descendants I interviewed expressed total disinterestin enlistment in national monumental commemorative sites andpractices. Yet a growing number of children of survivors are attend-ing meso–public heritage centers that function as survivor-familyniches of communality similar (in size and meso positioning if notin ludic content) to the House of Being.

44. For a discussion on the sequestration of death in Westernculture, see Mellor and Shilling 1993.

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accepted December 13, 2009final version submitted January 20, 2010

Carol A. KidronSociology—AnthropologyUniversity of HaifaMt. Carmel, HaifaIsrael

[email protected]

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