The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

Silvia Tennenbaum (1928-2016), a German born Jewish woman, author, and activist, lived in the United States following her family’s exile in 1936. Tennenbaum wrote multiple semi-autobiographical novels reflecting her grapples with memory. Towards the end of her life, Tennenbaum attempted to chronicle her memories more directly; instead of fictionalizing, she wrote specifically of the gaps in her recollections. The archival materials used for this paper, having remained unpublished, serve as a memorial to this fragmentation. Tennenbaum’s notes powerfully exemplify how first-person narratives of Jewish survivors of Nazism complicate Holocaust historiography and the Holocaust’s impact on the Jewish Diaspora. For decades, women’s experiences of the Holocaust were largely disregarded. Dedicated analysis of women’s experiences becomes vital in understanding the act of memorialization itself. While historical attention has focused on the contrasting experiences of men and women as better or worse, first-person testimony has lent itself to understanding variety and nuance in individual experiences, recognizing each as holding value in its own subjectivity. This is true for Tennenbaum and her lifelong struggle with memories of homeland and with realizing an identity amid loss and destruction. The researcher and the researched ask the same questions: What is the status of the fragmentary and the archival as elements of memorialization? What constitutes ethical engagement of resurrecting such evidence in the present? This paper brings Tennenbaum’s memories in their obscurity and archived state into focus, arguing that the subjunctive nature of Tennenbaum’s notes bridges Holocaust historical narrative with present Jewish identity and collective memory.