Central and Eastern Kentucky
(2009-11-04)
Listen Now:
RICHMOND, KY
(WEKU) -
This weekend's Kentucky Book Fair features the 2009 book This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak, a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors who live in the Commonwealth. WEKU's Julie Schindall sat down with the book's authors and has this story.
null
Sitting oral historian Arwen Donahue behind a microphone is a strange experience. This woman is a really good listener - so she doesn't talk a lot. Donahue has spent the last ten years listening, for up to 12 hours at a time, to Holocaust survivors, who live in Kentucky.
Her book This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak, includes interviews with nine survivors. It also features portraits of those survivors by Kentucky photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell.
Prior to moving to Kentucky in 1997, Donahue was a program coordinator in the oral history department at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After moving onto an organic farm in Kentucky with her husband and daughter, Donahue wanted to continue her work recording the experiences of survivors.
But interviews in Kentucky would be slightly different. Holocaust survivors tend to live in close-knit communities, particularly in the New York area. In the post-war period, there were around 90,000 Holocaust survivors living around New York City.
"There was a sense when survivors came to the US from Europe that New York was the place to be. Almost overwhelmingly, the survivors who came wanted to stay in New York. Two-thirds of them did remain there," Donahue says.
The remaining one-third mostly went to larger cities around the United States. In Kentucky, Donahue located 40 survivors.
Of the nine whose stories are featured in her book, several rarely spoke of their wartime experiences. Donahue is a quiet and almost shy woman. She took very seriously the survivors' willingness to talk to her.
"With Holocaust survivors, one of the things we learn as interviewers of survivors is that the interviewer can't understand. The interviewer can't understand and really can't imagine what she's experienced. You have to be open and listen as best you can and ask the questions that seem most pertinent," Donahue says.
Portrait photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell spent hours with the survivors, to get just the right shot.
Howell and Donahue are a well-matched pair, both sensitive and introspective women. They pick at a shared muffin while they ponder the artistic process of this project.
"I'm making their portrait by having a conversation with them, and finding a way to both have the camera in the room and not, at the same time. All of these portraits were made that way, while we were talking and sharing and getting to know each other, and the shutter was releasing, and the shutter was releasing. It's a matter of serendipity that way," Howell says.
A decade since the beginning of the project, Donahue and Howell maintain close friendships with all nine of the survivors featured in This Is Home Now. One survivor left Kentucky and another may soon follow, to be closer to her children.
And for those who remain - Donahue and Howell visit, sometimes bringing flowers and farm vegetables. And then, they settle down on the couch or around the table - and they listen. © Copyright 2012, WEKU
