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This blog serves to inform you of the latest interviews, projects, travels, and epiphanies regarding my current oral history project: The Jewish Community of El Salvador. Today's entry is a small effort to provide some background on both oral history and myself.

Raised in Texas, I am greatly influenced by my childhood experiences as a Jew in a strongly Christian evangelical state. Forced to examine my own identity as "the other" at a young age, I quickly became interested in the story of my family, particularly the life story of my grandparents. I was lucky to record and later publish my maternal grandmother's oral history of her life in Germany, Holland, El Salvador, and finally the United States. The powerful experience inspired me to continue gathering oral histories from this most dynamic community. Now with the help of a Fulbright fellowship, strong mentorship, personal study, professional audio, and video equipment, I am ready to document past and present community members in Central America, North America, and Israel. After many detours, I am back on the path to my original love: StoryListening.

The title "oral history" gives the individual a basic understanding of the craft. One is listening to and speaking about (rather than writing) history. The term itself is simple and cannot begin to truly describe what goes on in an interview. First and foremost, every interview is different. Almost always, an interview involves two individuals: the interviewer and the interviewee. Occasionally a sound technician will be present but I will not have such a luxury when traveling. Audio equipment and increasingly more common, a video camera are used to record the session. Very few notes are taken and the interviewer prepares very few if any questions. The interview will begin with basic biographical questions such as "where were you born?" "tell me about your parents, your siblings, your extended family." From this point, the interviewer gently guides the interviewee through the story of his/her life. There are no facts or dates to remember and sometimes it is those unconscious omissions that provide an interviewee with the most food for thought. When all is said and done, an oral history is simply the story of one individuals' life experience.

Before your interview, you might be interested in learning more about the craft that is oral history. The Oral History Association defines the discipline this way;

"Oral history is a method of gathering and preserving historical information through recorded interviews with participants in past events and ways of life. It is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s."

Large oral history collections can be found at a range of institutions throughout the world including non-profits, philanthropic organizations, universities, and foundations. Documentation of the tragedies of the twentieth century have been some of the first widely distributed oral histories, either in audio and/or video formats. Oral historians sought out the personal histories of those individuals who survived World War II, the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the events of 9/11 (amongst numerous others).

Enlisted with the task of collecting the official 9/11 oral history, the Columbia University Oral History Office describes it's mammoth project:
"Within the first year of the project over four hundred interviews were conducted with a wide variety of people who were affected directly and indirectly by the catastrophe. Two hundred follow-up interviews were conducted in the winter and spring of 2002, in order to allow those we interviewed in the first year to speak about the effects of their experiences over time. The objective of the project was to gather as many different individual perspectives on the impact of September 11th as possible, and to allow people to speak about their experiences outside the frameworks quickly developed by official media and government accounts."

The impact of the oral history interview is long-lasting. Not only can it be life-changing for the interviewer and the interviewee, its documentation serves to remind and refresh governmental bodies, scholars, historians, family, and community members of the triumphs and tragedies of those who "lived through it." Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office (OHRO) describes her South African Apartheid project as "life-changing." After an emotional interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she champions the craft as a tool for change. Despite her strong reaction, Clark admits that the Archbishop was not so sure about the act of remembering saying,

"It's good to have a little bit of amnesia, because when you think about the details of repression . . . you would really go crazy."

Clark disagrees,

"But from both a professional and a personal standpoint, I feel he's wrong: you risk going crazy if you have amnesia. It's thanks to speaking with him and working on this South Africa project that I'm more certain than ever—we've got to remember."