In the 21st century everyone is a writer with an important story to tell and easy access to publishing tools. Underpinning the phenomenon is a plethora of writing courses promoting the notion that all personal stories are equally interesting and should be shared. Is this a welcome advance on the quaint condition of the cottage industry known as publishing, where publishers acted as gatekeepers, editors edited and critics provided robust judgment?
Making sense of one’s life through writing and reflection can be useful. But so too is a stint on the therapist’s couch. In a period bloated by the fetish for the personal and a paucity of informed analysis, there is cause for concern. The compulsion to make a personal exercise public rests on the assumption that an individual’s story must be of interest to others.
Into this context accrue the testimonies of witnesses to defining moments in history. It has become commonplace to describe tumultuous historical events (kin which the 20th century tragically abounds) through the individual experience. The problem is that an individual’s account can only ever be myopic and clouded by the passage of time.
The story of one Hungarian survivor invited by the Spielberg oral history project to provide his testimony is instructive. For more than 50 years he had shared with his family his memories of the deportation of Jews from Budapest in 1944. For him the defining, catastrophic moment occurred when Arrow Cross fascists emptied his orphanage, herded the children down to the Danube River and murdered them.
This survivor had managed to hide in a cupboard with an overweight little boy. For years after, in Melbourne suburbia, he shared with his family his terror, the sensation of being crushed and suffocated in that cupboard. The emblematic episode of a child’s experience of World War II was never repressed, being recounted regularly. On telling his family his account, it emerged he had failed to record his story’s seminal moment: being one of the sole survivors of a mass murder of innocent children. He had borne witness for four hours without mention of this. Is his testimony of less value because of that omission? The psychoanalytically inclined might have a rich interpretation of this narrative lacuna. For more general readers, it should alert us to the provisionality and incompleteness of memoir as a genre.
So it is with these caveats that the reader should approach the memoirs by Marcel Weyland and Frank Vajda. Neither author is a professional writer. Each was a Jewish refugee, and each has had a long and successful career, the former as a Sydney architect and the latter as a Melbourne neurologist.
Read the full story by Louise Adler in The Australian
Louise Adler is chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing.