Ilana Rosen

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Hebrew Literature, Faculty Member

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Phone: 972-50-6651076
Address: Dept. of Hebrew Literature, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva 84105, ISRAEL

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Ilana Rosen

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Simone Gigliotti

Royal Holloway, University of London

Louise O. Vasvári

SUNY: Stony Brook University

Yael Zilberman Freidmann

The Open University of Israel

Louise O Vasvari

Gaon Center

Kobi Kabalek

Pennsylvania State University

Daniel Langton

The University of Manchester

Michal Friedman

Carnegie Mellon University

Glen Bates

Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn

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Papers by Ilana Rosen

Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, 2008

's book, based on her 1994 dissertation, is a thought-provoking work which foregrounds the female... more 's book, based on her 1994 dissertation, is a thought-provoking work which foregrounds the female experience in the Holocaust, using first-person accounts from Hungarian survivors, most of whom are now living in Israel. The stories are intrinsically gripping, as personal narratives, and provide additional layering of material on commonalities and differences among those who experienced the Holocaust (in particular, those from Hungary), and their lives before and afterwards. However, the main framework, and indeed the point, of the book is to approach and present the accounts through a "literary-psychoanalytical analysis" (Chapter 2) and a "phenomenological-hermeneutic analysis" (Chapter 3). This approach, grounded in Freudian and Jungian psychology and used by, among others, Lawrence Langer and Stanley Fish, and supplemented by anthropological and folklore vocabulary, makes for fairly heavy going for those, e.g., historians, who might choose to read the stories as "straight" narrative. Since the discussion of the genesis of the dissertation (to a certain extent, her own family history) and the analysis cover the first 133 pages, and the individual stories are presented only as an Appendix, covering pages135-221, Rosen's is definitely an unusual presentation of this important topic. Rosen's approach does have the advantages of allowing the reader to become acquainted gradually with her interviewees, and to compare differing accounts of similar experiences, but it also generates some confusion, since focusing on particular points of an interviewee's narrative means taking things out of context. (Of course, part of the point of this approach is to show that the context is constructed.) The three-part index does allow for useful referrals when reading the narratives. Although the subtitle of the book refers to "female Holocaust survivors from Hungary," the narratives presented in the book only include Jewish survivors living in Israel and in Hungary. A further constriction is that although Rosen had interviewed 39 survivors-26 women and 13 men-between 1989 and 1991, only 15 survivors' histories are provided in this book. These include two married couples (whose interviews are presented in one text) and a mother and daughter (two separate texts); the interviews are presented in English translation, though they were conducted in Hungarian and/or Hebrew. There is no explanation of the process Rosen used to select these particular narratives, to what extent they may have been edited (there is considerable variation in the length of the texts, but no ellipses are shown). Nor is there an explanation of her interviewing process: we learn that she used a tape-recorder and that some interviewees periodically asked for it to be turned off while they composed themselves or tried to remember something. While the transcripts show that Rosen occasionally made interjections or

Ilana Rosen

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