House As Metaphor: Women's Narrative Archives in Were The House Still Standing

House as Metaphor: Womens Narrative Archives
in Were the House Still Standing
Ellen M. Taylor
Abstract
This paper builds upon a foundation of narrative theory, which endorses storytelling as a
cognitive and cultural storehouse. Narratives organize our experiences and preserve our cultural
memories. Womens stories, often silenced, undervalued, or relegated to footnote, play a
profound role in our collective human experience. In the context of the Holocaust, womens
voices fill a void in the master narrative of the genocide. My comments address the ways in
which womens voices provide a critical perspective in the film Were the House Still Standing,
and ways students in literature and Womens Studies at the University of Maine at Augusta
respond to the film, which features Maine survivors and liberators. Systematic gendered violence
must be understood in the past to understand the present. As a pedagogical resource, Were the
House Still Standing provides multiple opportunities to explore the profound metaphor of the
house in all its contexts, to probe how surviving genocide is a gendered experience, and to
consider how women may narrate their experiences of wartime and of identity.
Keywords: Gendered violence, womens stories, Maine survivors

The International Journal of Conflict & Reconciliation
Spring 2017, Volume 3 Number 1
1

Words ascend amidst grayish vapours,

Writhe about like a woman with birth-pains,
Linger, and will not fade.
(Gertrude Kolmer,Judith")1
Introduction
Although Gertrude Kolmer did not return from Auschwitz, her words survive; they linger over
the rubble of the Holocaust and speak to us. I come to Holocaust material as a poet, and as a
teacher of literature, and of Womens Studies. These three lenses inform my understanding of
womens Holocaust experiences. As a writer and a teacher, I am interested in the power of
words, in stories as both cognitive architecture and as archives for storing cultural memory.
Theorist Sutton-Smith discusses our search for a model of the human mind. He writes,
It can be argued, that since story telling is as old as human history in every group about which
there is knowledge, narrative is a fair candidate for being such a model. From this point of view,
the most basic human mind is a story telling one (Sutton-Smith 1981:37). From pictures
painted on cave walls, hieroglyphics inked on papyrus, to texts copied on scrolls, typed on onion
skin paper, keyboarded on computers, now texted and Twittered, we remain drawn to stories.
They organize our experiences; they preserve our individual, communal, and cultural memories.
As a teacher of literature and Womens Studies, I consider gender in all my readings, not
only those by or about women. Yet when we focus on womens words, we find the stories of
mothers and midwives, sisters and healers, confidantes and oracles. They are the stories of
kitchens, birthing rooms, burials, and ancestry. Women have been the caregivers from birth to
deathbringing lives into the air and preparing bodies to return to the earth.

2

Yet, despite the profound role of women in our collective human experience, our voices
were long silenced, ignored, edited, or kept uneducated. New theories about womens roles in
Biblical narratives are often greeted with skepticism, such as the Gospel of Mary of Magdala
(Kaleem 2013). In the Christian New Testament, Paul reminds his audience that women should
be silent in the Churches (Keller 2011:56). Moving east, in the Hunan providence of China,
women were often denied access to written language. In recourse, they created their own:
Nushu, literally meaning womens language. Beginning in the year of approximately 900 CE,
women created a secret script, described as elegant, feminine, elongated like the legs of cranes .
. . binding women together outside the rules (Hall 2007:140). In India, women continue to be
terrorized as rape victims, and are often without organizing power or education
(Chakkuvarackal 2003:58). Globally, womens access to formal education and literacy has
consistently trailed mens; this continues to be problematic in so-called developing nations. In
the United States, it is only since the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s that
womens voices began to be recognized as part of our academic canon. Beyond the academy,
womens voices are often faint, yet growing stronger.
Now that women have earned some credibility for our stories, our understanding of
history and humanity is richer. Because women and men experience the world with varying
roles and expectations, acknowledging our gendered lens both informs and complicates our grasp
of human experience, its past, present, and future.
It is only in the past generation that feminist scholars and others have embraced gendered

3

readings of Holocaust narratives (Heinemann 1986; Ritter and Roth 1993). As Sara Horowitz
notes, womens missing voices can be read as a gaping hole in the master narrative of the Nazi
genocide (2004:111, emphasis mine). We know that women werearemore than caretakers,
makers of matzo balls and chicken soup, mothers and martyrs. We know that women's
experiences of the Holocaust differed from mens: women were subject to rape, unwanted
pregnancy, abortion, and execution with their children (Kremer 1999; Ringelheim 1998).
Womens bodies made them vulnerable to violence in ways related to both biological sex and
socio/cultural gender. Surviving genocide is a gendered experience.
House as Metaphor in Were the House Still Standing
O Sister,
Where do your pitch your tent?
(Nelly Sachs, O Sister)2
The notion of the house, the domestic living space, the nest of safety and security, is a recurring
theme in many womens narratives. As Gaston Bachelard writes in his exploration The Poetics
of Space, our house is our corner of the world . . . it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every
sense of the word (1969:4). Deep in our psyche, according to Bachelard, we yearn for dwelling
spaces, for lairs, where our bodies and our imaginations can be safe and flourish. Houses are
protective spaces for birth, nourishment, repose.
In the film, Were the House Still Standing, created by Robert Katz and featured as a

4

permanent installation at the University of Maine at Augusta, the metaphor of "the house" is
wide and deep. The title evokes the destruction of the Second Temple referenced in the lines
from the Musaf Service: Were the house still standing/ Would we bring live lambs to slaughter?/
Would we share our surplus as much with priests as with the poor?/ We were driven from the
house too soon to find the answer;/ History has robbed us of the choice.
Yet the house is more than the Second Temple: it is the house of the Jewish nation, of a
community, of a family, of a bodyall these houses were molested and mortared by the
Holocaust. In the house that is the body, it is a womans body which gives life to all others.
The domestic spaces that we call houses and homes are part of the gendered testimony in
Were the House Still Standing. We see womens houses, the environments they have created to
live their post-Holocaust lives in Mainethe most northeast corner of the United States: a deck
with potted begonias, a living room with a stand-up piano, kitchens with dishwashers, dining
rooms with dimmer switches and curio cases. As Hartman reminds us, each testimony is . . .
performative as well as informative (2004:209). We can see the stages they have set for their
narrative performances: glasses of water perched on coasters on the dining table, cups of coffee
or tea, plates of cake, photo albums, a vase of flowers.
Video testimony also gives us the body (Lubin 2004:226). Like draperies and artwork in
the house, women dress their bodies with care. In the film, we see women in sweaters and
tailored blouses and jackets. Women with pearls and wedding rings and watches. The crossing
of legs, folding of arms, a twist of an earring, or engagement with the camera, can all be read as

5

gendered gestures. They are also gestures of those whom survived.
Video testimony also gives us the voice. We hear sighs, quivering hesitations, rising
volume, cadences of English spoken as a second language. With the vernacular texture of the
voice, we have additional material to inform the story being told: we see and hear someone who
is more than a victim, who has the courage to face the past and its suffering once more"
(Hartman 2004:209). Privileging the voice of the survivor, herstory, rather than disembodied
data, is a hallmark of feminist Holocaust scholarship (Nowak 1999:34).
Early in the film, aside from the voices of the survivors, we hear the native language of
Anne Frank from her diary entry of Saturday, July 15th, 1944, being read by Esther van Peer, a
14-year-old Dutch girl. This female voice embodies the text familiar to so many viewers: I
hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions .
. . . This youthful voice reminds us of the wasted potential of 15-year-old Anne; she is our sister,
our daughter, our niece or neighbor.
The subsequent voices that inform the soundscape of the first entracte represent the
Polish language of many of the victims and survivors. These voices serve as a chorus before we
focus on our first speaker, Julia Skalina3, in her Maine house. Her prominent childhood
memories include the smell of her mothers clean house, the garden, and a rare flower whose
blossom portends bad luck.
Julia, in blue floral skirt, white blouse, and twisted strings of pearls, sits with a vase of
cut flowers beside her. She invites us into her home with her granddaughter, also dressed in

6

floral print, and shares with the viewer the carefully constructed pages of a family photo album,
images pressed behind plastic covers to preserve family history. Later we hear of her fathers
interrogation, his death, the beginning of the dissolution of the family. Julia tells us of, after
deportation and upon arrival at the camp, seeing women with shaved heads, dressed in odd
clothes. Her fate is forecast. She too will be stripped and shaved, until, she says, [w]e werent
human beings.
The films archival footage of these strange women peering out at us with gaunt faces,
hollow eyes, their bodies ravaged by hunger and disease, presents a stark contrast with the
survivor Julia and her robust granddaughter, sitting at the dining room table. The house that is
their home is neatly furnished, arranged; the house that is the body is nourished, well-dressed.
Julia and her granddaughter look through family photos: aunts posing for the camera, mother and
daughter in matching polka dot dresses. The ancestral story is housed in the photo album, and,
subsequently, in the film.
Tama Fineberg4 also initially focuses on her childhood house, in particular the hiding
place her father had created under a hutch. There he had dug a crawl space as an escape route
beneath the floor boards. When the Nazis came to their neighborhood, Tama, her sister, and their
mother slipped through the basement, into the back streets and alleyways, and finally into the
forest at the edge of their village. Somehow, Tama tells us, she and her mother became separated
from her sister, and at each farm or clearing, they asked about her. They kept missing each other
by days or hours. Her sister, in isolation from her mother and sister, gave herself up in

7

desperation, and was killed.
In Tamas story, the family house is dismantled. The family itself is terrorized; the sister
executed, the mother and daughter then the only surviving pair. We hear the desperation in
Tamas voice recalling her sister, recalling the flight, the fear, the grief. The trauma is manifest
in her broken voice. The house of the body is all that remains.
Rochelle Slivka,5 shown in silhouette, tells one of the most chilling stories in the film:
how men from her community were taken away and burned; how when babies cried, soldiers
would grab their feet and tear them apart, then throw them back to their mothers. The
mutilation and destruction of the sacred house of the body is all the more horrific when the
subject is a child.
This emphasis on mother and child resonates through many of the womens Holocaust
narratives. As in written memoir, the family unit or replication of such a unit features
prominently (Ringelheim 1998). Womens connections to their children and families are more
than socially constructed. Mother and child share the same house of the body for nine months
during fetal development. In Meredith Halls memoir, she describes how women carry fetal cells
from their babies, for decades after each birth: This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and
child, is called human microchimerism (2007:177). The implications, Hall writes, are
enormous: Mother and child do not fully separate at birth. The child lives in the mothers
cellular structure, long after the umbilical cord has been cut. Mother and child share the same
house.

8

Despite the attention to nurturing behaviors, to caring for children and each other, the
women in the film do not shy from acknowledging the most barbaric of all their memories.
Gerda Hass6 tells us that in the Gypsy camps the victims were burned alive, as the crematoriums
were working night and day to keep up with the transport of Hungarian Jews. She recalls the
terrible screaming, smells of burning flesh and flame.
Stories of the liquidation of the camps in 1945 remind us this was the beginning of
another torturous phase: the forced marches in the cold, the hunger and thirst and sadistic
executions for sucking on fallen snow. Those that survived often met with subsequent loss when
learning of executed family members and obliterated communities. The broad emotional
devastation after liberation is too vast to be encapsulated in the phrase survivor guilt. As Sonia
Messerschmidt7 reminds us near the end of the film, it gets more difficult, not easier, to talk
about the past.
Were the House Still Standing also employs cinematic devices that connect us to the
speakers stories. The split screen highlights our parallel geographies, as well as visual and
auditory temporal distinctions: the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, juxtaposed with Maine
spring water; sirens and train engines contrasted with the laughter of the loons; crickets in Polish
cemeteries and Maine sparrows in unfolding ferns. The chronological black and white archival
footage of the Holocaust, against the colors of the Maine landscape of our survivors, puts the
past in the background against the vibrancy of the present (see Eley and Grossmann, cited in
Lubin 2004: 227). Footage of the streets, ghettos, camps, and liberation are spliced with our

9

contemporary landscape, and the homes, bodies, faces, and voices of these survivorsour
neighbors.
When showing this film to students in Maine, we have a visual identification with these
women, as we see our familiar landscape of forest, stream, and snowdrift. We know the
architecture of these houses, the impatiens potted on the deck, the screen doors and storm
windows. Even with our wide socio-economic range, students recognize the dormered windows
and wind chimes on the deck: These are our houses too.
Womens Studies Students Responses to Were the House Still Standing
Im infuriated, sad, and mortified . . . But I know

this movie impacted me for the better.

Womens Studies is part of the core curriculum of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights
minor at the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA), where this installation is housed. UMA is
an open-admissions, non-traditional commuter branch of our University system, founded in 1964
with an ideology of access and opportunity to all. The majority of our students are women in
their 30s. In Womens Studies, students are typically female, about half are mothers, and of
those about half have a committed partner. Most students take classes and work part-time.
Introduction to Womens Studies (WST 101) introduces students to the interdisciplinary
nature of gender issues, and looks at health, education, religion, sociology, economics, pop

10

culture, and politics. We approach this film, Were the House Still Standing, with a human rights
lens, not to compare gendered atrocity.
Students notice womens attention to the home, family, relationships, and especially
children. Many are visibly disturbed by Rochelle Slivkas recollection of German soldiers
tearing apart the limbs of a baby. Also indelible is one image of a woman lying in the snow
outside the barracksthe vulnerability of her bodynaked, her black hair juxtaposed against the
white snow. This image comes up again and again as one of the most impressionable still shots
in the film.
Other noteworthy observations include the post-Holocaust adaptability of these women
living among us in Maine, with potted plants and decks, tea sets and tidy kitchens. These
domestic details that the video testimony captures, particularly against the backdrop of black and
white footage of the events leading to the death camps, deeply resonate for students. The
cinematic device of the split screen reminds many students of our interconnectivity, how time
and place are almost arbitrary dividers that separate us, how any of us could have been these
women.
Also interesting is how the early Anne Frank quotation resonates for students. I
understand some consider Annes published diary saccharine, and others critique pedagogy
which lacks the critical framework of the Frank family as assimilated German Jews in
Amsterdam (Bos 2004:351). The diarys emphasis on the essential goodness of people dilutes
the horror of the Holocaust happening outside Annes familys annex. The journal ends before

11

Annes experience outside the attic begins: her transport to Bergen-Belsen, lice, hunger, thirst,
and her death from typhus in 1945. The reader of Anne Franks diary does not hear the
disheartening details of the end of her life; instead we marvel at her optimism. In her entry dated
July 15, 1944, she asserts, in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at
heart.
When asked in advance what they know about the Holocaust, and how they know it,
several students recall reading The Diary of Anne Frank as children or teenagers. Anne speaks to
adolescent angst, to a developmental stage when we separate from our parents and the adults
who try to conform us. This is what many young adults take away from Annes powerful diary.
Not a story of the Holocaust, but a story of a teenage girl annexed in her life. The quote included
in the film taps into this memory and more: it connects the diary to the images and testimony
which follow, forming a bridge from a childhood lesson to the present. The film makes explicit
what the diary does not: Annes fate after her diary is put down.
Many students respond viscerally to the stories of mothers and children. As mothers
themselves, playing a role in the education of their children, students often cite the twin emotions
of fear and responsibility. Here are a few quotes from a recent screening of the film in Augusta,
Maine (February 7, 2013) to a group of Women Studies students written comments:
I feel incredibly sad and frustrated that to a degree, acts like this still happen. At
certain points I felt physically ill to experience pictures of the cruelty and to hear
the sounds these people might have heard.

12

Emotions that come to mind are being scared, sad, and disgusted [sic]. What
would I do if I was in that situation? I thought about my daughter and all Id do
to protect her.My mother would never let me go. That quote struck me to the
core.
I feel fear for the people and sadness for them. Some saw parents die in front of
them and children die in front of them. Some kids were separated from their
families. Just putting myself in that situation with my two year old I dont know
that I would do.
Women are spoken of as the homemakers, caretakers; men have jobs and titles.
Women are taking on these huge protective roles for their childreneven young
girls have a huge responsibility to inform their mothers and grandmothers of their
fathers deaths. Men are hiding children and are killed, leaving women to lead
their children to safety.
My first reaction to the film that this happened in the world angers me [sic]. Here
we go from peaceful moments in Maine to this tragic time in World War II. I also
thought what would I do in that situation? The fact that they [Jews] were given
up for a bag of sugara life for a bag of sugar.
Certain quotes from the presentation rang true as pieces of hope and information
to pass on to others so as to change the future: if you kill one man, you kill the

13

world; Keeping silenceso important to speak up!; little by little the
happiness of youth faded away. Every day I see how the youth in the world
today is changing in the wrong direction. Children arent being taught where to
put value in the world.
I found it amazing that these individuals were willing to share their stories,
because Ive heard that a lot of people who go through horrific events wont talk
about them.
Younger generations need to be educated. This film gives a human side to the
story, instead of just the numbers behind the Holocaust.
Conclusion
Gendered experience of genocide(s) is symptomatic of a systemic condition where women are
globally subjugated, and survivors of assault are silenced or trivialized. Honoring womens
voices from the Holocaust is part of a larger necessity to acknowledge, document, and teach the
atrocities committed against women in Armenia, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Serbia, Syria, and the list sadly goes on.
In our current social media-saturated environment, we are less likely to be in the
proverbial darkness about gender-based violence, yet we must remain vigilant. In our own back
yards and alleyways, girls are still at risk: When a college male rapes an unconscious girl outside

14

a dumpster, tries to flee, denies wrong doing, is found guilty, and ultimately sentenced to six
months of jail, we must admit, we have a social condition that condones violence against women
(Stack 2016). While this is one example among so many that occur with astounding regularity
on college campuses and elsewhere, the survivors story gives us an opportunity to talk and
teach. Understanding how this one rape fits into our larger history as girls and women can lead
to empowerment. Activism needs awareness, and awareness can start here (All Things
Considered 2016; Baker, 2016). The social media coverage of this particular crime is useful, as
it offers teachable moments in households and classrooms across the country and beyond.
In the global theater, violence against women in refugee camps is escalating, and the needs
of women and children in war sieged territories is grossly neglected (Waisman). Sexual and
gender- based violence (SGVB) continues along the proverbial road from war to displacement
camp, the final stage being more like a prison for many women and children (UNHCR). The
ramifications of these homeless refugees will last at least a generation.
Making connections between quotidian violence and historical phenomena is imperative to
affect change. Films such as the documentary Were the House Still Standing, provide multiple
opportunities to probe how surviving genocide is a gendered experience, to consider how women
may narrate their experiences of wartime and of identity, and to explore the profound metaphor
of the house in all these contexts. The figurative patriarchal fortress will only be dismantled by
listening to the female voices speaking through the chinks in the wall. Honoring the voices of our
daughters and sisters, our mothers and grandmothers, the voices of our life stream, must be part

15

of our collective consciousness and of our memory. As Ezrehi writes in her essay "Questions of
Authenticity," the infinite horizons of a post-Holocaust universe (64) depend on subsequent
generations' readings and re-readings. The story of the Holocaust will belong not only to the
historian and the literary critic, but to the reader of memoirs and the viewer of films, to the
informed citizen of our shared planet. Once touched by the story of the Holocaust, it lives in our
memorys house: we must pass it on to keep the house standing.
Notes
Gertrude Kolmer (1894-1943). Born in Berlin, Kolmer was fluent in French, English,
Russian, and her native German. She published two books of poetry before she was deported to
Auschwitz, where she is presumed to have died.

16

Nelly Sachs (1891-1970). Sachs was born in Germany and immigrated to Sweden early
in the war, thanks to a mentor living there. She worked as a translator and devoted her life to
writing poems about the Holocaust. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966.
Julia K. Skalina was born in 1925 in Slovakia, and lived there happily until her family
was taken to concentration camps during World War 11. Of 24 close family members, she was
one of four who survived. She spent her last years in Portland, Maine, near her granddaughters.
Julia passed away in December, 2010.
Tama Fineberg was born in Poland in 1937. She settled in Maine after the war.
Rochelle Slivka spent the early part of World War II in the Vilna ghetto, and then was
deported with her sister to Kaiserwald camp in Latvia and later to Stutthof, near Danzig. In 1945,
on the sixth week of a death march, the Soviet army liberated them. She passed away in Maine,
in April, 2005.

17

Gerda Haas was born in 1922 in Ansbach, Germany. At the age of 21 she was sent to
Ghetto Theresienstadt. She survived the camp and, in 1946, she immigrated to the United States
and to Maine.
Sonja Messerschmidt was born in Berlin in 1925. After her parents were deported in
the spring of 1943, Sonja was hidden by her fiance, Kurt Messerschmidt, and his family.
Subsequently deported themselves, Sonja and Kurt were married in April 1944 in the
Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1950, Sonja and Kurt emigrated to the United States; they
moved to Portland in 1951 and raised their children. She passed away in October, 2010.
References
All Things Considered. (2016). Stanford University, Sexual Assault, and Parenting. Retrieved
June 13, 2016. http://www.npr.org/2016/06/11/481703081/barbershop-stanford-university-
sexual-assault-and-parenting.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baker, Katie. (2016). Here is the powerful letter the Stanford victim read aloud to her attacker.
Retrieved June 13, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-
letter- the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.ggGnVgYAG#.kkRoMkxBY.

18

Bos, Pascale. (2004). Reconsidering Anne Frank: Teaching the Diary in Its Historical and
Cultural Context. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, edited by
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, pp. 348-359. New York: MLA.
Chakkuvarackal, T. Johnson. (2003). Women-Power in Canonical Gospels: A Paradigm for
Modern Patriarchal Societies. Bangalore Theological Forum 34 (2).
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. (2004). Questions of Authenticity. Teaching the Representation of the
Holocaust, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, pp. 52-67. New York: MLA.
Frank, Anne. (2001). The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Doubleday.
Hall, Meredith. (2007). Without a Map. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hartman, Geoffrey. (2004). Audio and Video Testimony and Holocaust Studies.
Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Irene
Kacandes, pp. 205-219. New York: MLA.
Heinemann, Marlene E. (1986). Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Hirsch, Marianne, and Irene Kacandes, editors. (2004). Teaching the Representation of the
Holocaust. New York: MLA.

19

Horowitz, Sara R. (2004). Gender and Holocaust Representation. Teaching the Representation
of the Holocaust, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, pp. 110-122. New York:
MLA.
Kaleem, Jaweed. (2013). The Gospel of Jesus Wife New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus
May Have Been Married. Huffington Post. September 18, 2012. Retrieved January 25,
2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/the-gospel-of-jesus-wife-
_n_1891325.html.
Katz, Robert. (2007). Were the House Still Standing (film installation). University of Maine at
Augusta. Augusta, Maine.
Keller, Catherine. (2011). Returning God. The Gift of Feminist Theology. Feminism,
Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, edited by Linda Martin, Alcoff and John D. Caputo,
pp. 55-76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kolmer, Gertrud. (1993). Judith. 365 in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of
Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kremer, S. Lillian. (1999). Womens Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.

20

Lubin, Orly. (2004). Teaching Cinema, Teaching the Holocaust. Teaching the Representation
of the Holocaust, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, pp. 220-233. New
York: MLA.
Nowak, Susan E. (1999). In a World Shorn of Color: Toward a Feminist Theology of
Holocaust Testimonies. Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, edited
by Esther Fuchs, pp 33-46. New York: University Press of America.
Ofer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman. (1998). Women in the Holocaust. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Ringelheim, Joan. (1998). The Split Between Gender and the Holocaust. Women in the
Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, pp. 340-350. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Ritter, Carol and John K. Roth. (1993). Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. New York:
Paragon House.
Sachs, Nelly. 1993. O Sister. 362 in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of
Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Stack, Liam. (2016). Light Sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford Rape Case Draws Outrage.
New York Times. June 7, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2016.

21

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/outrage-in-stanford-rape-case-over-dueling-
statements-of-victim-and-attackers-.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. (1981). The Folk Stories of Children. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sexual and Gender-based Violence Prevention
and Response In Refugee Situations in the Middle East and North Africa, 25 November
2015. Retrieved from : http://www.refworld.org/docid/568f9a014.html
Waisman, Viviana. (2016, August). Elevating the Voices of Women and Children in the Refugee
Crisis. Retrieved from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/elevating-voices-
women-and-children-refugee-crisis

22

House As Metaphor: Women's Narrative Archives in Were The House Still Standing

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

House As Metaphor: Women's Narrative Archives in Were The House Still Standing

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

House as Metaphor: Womens Narrative Archives

in Were the House Still Standing

Words ascend amidst grayish vapours,

womens Holocaust experiences. As a writer and a teacher, I am interested in the power of

consistently trailed mens; this continues to be problematic in so-called developing nations. In

womens voices are often faint, yet growing stronger.

of human experience, its past, present, and future.

socio/cultural gender. Surviving genocide is a gendered experience.

House as Metaphor in Were the House Still Standing

protective spaces for birth, nourishment, repose.

or tea, plates of cake, photo albums, a vase of flowers.

gendered gestures. They are also gestures of those whom survived.

data, is a hallmark of feminist Holocaust scholarship (Nowak 1999:34).

our daughter, our niece or neighbor.

blossom portends bad luck.

subsequently, in the film.

desperation, and was killed.

terrible screaming, smells of burning flesh and flame.

about the past.

Womens Studies Students Responses to Were the House Still Standing

Im infuriated, sad, and mortified . . . But I know

an open-admissions, non-traditional commuter branch of our University system, founded in 1964

Introduction to Womens Studies (WST 101) introduces students to the interdisciplinary

lens, not to compare gendered atrocity.

Other noteworthy observations include the post-Holocaust adaptability of these women

Maine (February 7, 2013) to a group of Women Studies students written comments:

the sounds these people might have heard.

would I do if I was in that situation? I thought about my daughter and all Id do

that I would do.

their children to safety.

up for a bag of sugara life for a bag of sugar.

world; Keeping silenceso important to speak up!; little by little the

put value in the world.

story, instead of just the numbers behind the Holocaust.

Gendered experience of genocide(s) is symptomatic of a systemic condition where women are

Serbia, Syria, and the list sadly goes on.

In our current social media-saturated environment, we are less likely to be in the

ramifications of these homeless refugees will last at least a generation.

Making connections between quotidian violence and historical phenomena is imperative to

Authenticity," the infinite horizons of a post-Holocaust universe (64) depend on subsequent

memorys house: we must pass it on to keep the house standing.

Auschwitz, where she is presumed to have died.

Julia passed away in December, 2010.

June 13, 2016. http://www.npr.org/2016/06/11/481703081/barbershop-stanford-university-

Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Retrieved June 13, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-

Cultural Context. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, edited by

Chakkuvarackal, T. Johnson. (2003). Women-Power in Canonical Gospels: A Paradigm for

Modern Patriarchal Societies. Bangalore Theological Forum 34 (2).

Hall, Meredith. (2007). Without a Map. Boston: Beacon Press.

Kacandes, pp. 205-219. New York: MLA.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Holocaust. New York: MLA.

Augusta. Augusta, Maine.

pp. 55-76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

University of Nebraska Press.

Nowak, Susan E. (1999). In a World Shorn of Color: Toward a Feminist Theology of

by Esther Fuchs, pp 33-46. New York: University Press of America.

Yale University Press.

London: Yale University Press.

New York Times. June 7, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2016.

Sutton-Smith, Brian. (1981). The Folk Stories of Children. Philadelphia: University of

2015. Retrieved from : http://www.refworld.org/docid/568f9a014.html