 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5001-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/595623 Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 1, February 2009 5 Toward an Ethnography of Silence The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel by Carol A. Kidron CA+ Online-Only Material: Supplements A–C Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the “unspeakability” of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendants entail only the “absence of presence” of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster only the wounds of transmitted PTSD. Contrary to the literature, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants depict the survivor home as embedding the nonpathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent, embodied practices, person-object interaction, and person-person interaction. These silent traces form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that sustains familial “lived memory” of the past and transmits tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu. The ethnography of silent memory may also provide a tentative model of nontraumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life. Eve was my tenth child-of-Holocaust-survivor interviewee. 1 As had my previous interviewees, Eve began by saying that she did not know anything about her parents’ Holocaust past, because they had never spoken about it, and that she was sorry, but she would probably waste my time. I already knew the routine. Eve, like all the others, would soon begin telling me about her daughter, who had had a transformative ex- perience on her high school “March of the Living” roots trip to Poland and had later developed a close bond with her survivor grandparents. She would recommend that I speak with her daughter instead—the third generation—and I would do so, trying to avoid further “failed” interviews with children of survivors. However, just as I was asking myself how I could salvage my research on trauma-descendant mem- ory-identity work, Eve was silent for a long time and said, But you know the Holocaust was present in my home. My mother would cry in her sleep. It would wake me up and . . . I would put my head under the pillow so not to hear her .... I knew that my father would wake her up so she would stop screaming. If it didn’t stop, sometimes I would Carol A. Kidron is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa (Mt. Carmel 31905, Israel [ckidron@soc.haifa.ac.il]). This paper was submitted 30 VIII 07 and accepted 26 VI 08. have to wake him up so he . . . he would stop her. Sometimes she would cry like that twice in one night. This would repeat itself . . . night after night. Although this was a major breakthrough in my research, I was struck by the matter-of-fact and emotionless way Eve told her story. The tale of survivor nightmares and weeping has become an iconic sign of survivor suffering and has been presented in therapeutic literature as a key symptom of post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I asked myself, Could it be that Eve experienced her mother’s daily distress and the dis- turbance to her own sleep as her taken-for-granted everyday life-world, or was I banalizing genocidal trauma and descen- dant experience? 2 After hearing the story, I asked Eve whether she remem- bered understanding at the time why her mother was crying. She responded, I didn’t know why she was crying, I knew she was having a bad dream, that it must have been something very fright- 1. All names have been altered for confidentiality. 2. The ethical dilemma of the “banalization” of Holocaust suffering has emerged as a central theme in Holocaust and genocide research; scholars are concerned with the tension between critical deconstruction of Holocaust experience (and with artistic or fictional literary represen- tation) on the one hand and what has been culturally framed as the “hallowed” nature of sublime genocidal suffering on the other.