This innovative study analyzes testimonies of Holocaust survivors through the lens of their “narrative ecologies,” an approach that pays close attention to the language and specific cultural, social, and political environment in which a testimony was recorded. This operative concept centers on cultural bias shared by the interviewer and interviewee as well as on the differences in their respective cultural backgrounds. The interdisciplinary methodology of this study brings together close textual analysis of the testimonies in their original languages with anthropological examination of the interpersonal dynamics of the emotionally intense and psychologically strenuous interaction between the speaker and the listener.

Each narrative ecology, Pollin-Galay argues, produces a special genre mode of testimony. American English-language testimonies tend to be personal-allegorical, presenting an individual experience as a moral instruction to the audience which is geographically and culturally remote from eastern Europe. Testimonies given in Israel in Hebrew are described as “communal-monumental,” offering the listener a lesson in a teleological interpretation of Jewish history leading from the suffering of the Holocaust to the triumph of the Jewish state. While the testimonies from the first two sets mostly come from the collection of the Shoah Foundation Archive and were taken in the mid-1990s, the Yiddish-language testimonies were recorded by the author in Lithuania about ten years later. They offer a “collective-forensic” analysis of the events, focusing on specific details and passing judgment on behavior of concrete individuals.

Using as her case study the relatively small and culturally homogenous sub-ethnic community of Litvaks (Jews from Lithuania and Belarus who speak the same dialect of Yiddish, share a common cultural background and a similar experience during World War II), Pollin-Galay convincingly demonstrates the powerful impact of the “ecology” on the testimony, which offers the survivors “the resources to define the transformations they have witnesses” (13), but also channels their narrative towards the expectations of their environment. By examining testimonies in three different narrative ecologies comparatively, this study raises important questions about the conditions of remembering and modes of collective memory that go beyond the scope of this particular project. Pollin-Gallay's meticulous analysis of the inherent cultural assumptions in communicating traumatic experience challenges the prevailing monolingual approach which ignores the original language of the testimony attempting to establish a “universal semiotics of suffering” (266).

The first chapter, provocatively titled “Bad Testimony: Making and Breaking the Rules of Witnessing,” explores the “invisible power” of the cultural environment, which can sometimes cause a sense of misunderstanding, mistrust, or even lead to a direct confrontation between the interviewer and interviewee due to their different presumptions and expectations. The second chapter deals with the testimonies that consciously or subconsciously prioritize the sense of communal (Yiddish), national (Hebrew), or all-human solidarity (English), moving teleologically from “wound to healing” or “destruction to national resurrection” (106). The third chapter focuses on the accounts of the “victim-perpetrator encounter,” for which, Pollin-Galay argues, survivors are not able provide an adequate representation that would not unsettle their narrative. The fourth chapter examines the “archival” aspect of the testimonies, treating them as a repository of the historical “aura” of oral narration which gets lost in transcription. Here Yiddish, the native language of the interviewees, occupies a privileged position compared to Hebrew and English as the site of authenticity. The final chapter contrasts the testimonies taken in Lithuania, where concrete locations are saturated with memories, with those recorded in Israel and America, where the past experience is relegated to remote dark “non-places.” The differences in conceptual mapping produce two different kinds of Holocaust memory, “one in which catastrophe is tidily periodized and separated from ordinary life, and one in which a painful past is integrated into a more varied concept of the present day” (259).

By emphasizing the significance of the untranslatable elements of testimonies recorded in different ecologies, Pollin-Galay makes a powerful and timely intervention in the field of the Holocaust studies. Oral testimonies in Yiddish present obvious difficulties to many contemporary researchers whose language skills are limited to reading, and therefore are used less often than testimonies in other languages. As Pollin-Galay compellingly demonstrates, this is a significant deficiency of which many researchers may not even be aware. In her account, Yiddish testimonies appear as more conflicting, troubling, and challenging some of contemporary stereotypes. They engage the listener in a direct and personal way, by taking her from safety of the contemporary comfort zone and collapsing the distance between the present and the past. Ecologies of Witnessing opens up a new direction of research inviting scholars to examine testimonies in other languages, such as Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, etc. These new “ecologies” will expand Pollin-Galays three-part typology by adding new genre modification. It would be particularly important to add a Soviet ecology, which has somehow remained on the margins of Pollin-Galay's study, even though Soviet experience had a powerful and long-lasting impact on the lives of many of her respondents.