Learning to teach complex topic

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Dr. Alan Rosen opened his remarks at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's Biennial Shafran Teachers' Conference talking about the significance of the meeting day, the 26th of Shevat (Feb. 20). Adar – the month in which Purim falls and in which Jews are called to increase joy – was only a week away, so Rosen said he began his lecture with a sense of irony. Conference participants were there to discuss very sad things, there was no way around that fact, he said, but, with Adar approaching, there's a sense of horizon: the sadness has a boundary and it's our responsibility to cultivate joy outside the boundary.

Almost 100 educators came to the Holocaust centre to hear the keynote lectures of Rosen, who works at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, and Dr. Adam Jones of the University of British Columbia Okanagan, as well as to participate in one of three concurrent afternoon workshops. While the vast majority of attendees were teachers or student teachers, there were several rabbis and almost a dozen VHEC docents present.

Frieda Miller, executive director of the VHEC, said the conference is absolutely central to the centre's role as a teaching museum.

"We reach hundreds of teachers in many different ways throughout the year," she explained. "Teachers learn along with their students when they participate in exhibit tours, at high school symposia or borrow our resources. However, the Shafran conference allows us to address the professional development needs of teachers directly by giving them time to learn, reflect on their learning and share best practices with peers.

"The goal of the conference is for teachers to return not only to their classrooms, but to their school communities with a more profound understanding of the history and related issues, as well as the motivation, skills and confidence to address such a complex, sensitive and often difficult subject matter with their students," she continued. "By training teachers, we extend our educational reach and multiply the educational impact of our work across the province and over time.

"As well, many teachers who have come to our conferences or other programs go on to become further engaged with our mandate and find ways of giving back to us. They volunteer as part of our Teachers' Advisory group, develop their own teaching units and become presenters themselves (as in the case of Jonathan Friedrichs and Shannon Moore)."

Friedrichs and Moore led the conference workshop titled More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Both are teachers at Killarney Secondary School in Vancouver and the two educators led their group through a new teaching tool they developed, which is connected with the VHEC's upcoming exhibit, Canada and the 1936 Berlin Olympics (starting in fall 2009). The teaching kit explores Canada's response to the 1936 Games, the context of anti-Semitism in Canada in the 1930s, as well as topics such as the Nazis' use of propaganda, the intersection between the Olympics, politics and national identity, and the role of media in the Olympic Games.

Jones led a workshop on Teaching Comparative Genocide, and Rosen's afternoon session was called Ways of Literary Coping: Three Elie Wiesel Narratives. The day began, however, with each professor giving an interactive one-hour lecture to all of the conference participants.

Rosen spoke on Thick Language, or On the Virtues of a Literary Approach to the Holocaust. Anthropologists, historians and others try to make their language clear, "a transparent window into that subject," he said, where the attention is not drawn to the language used. A literary approach, however, does want the language to be noticed, to be "thick," to "remind us of language itself," he explained.

Rosen's talk focused on wartime writing. He took conference participants through three texts: the short story The Jewish Letter Carrier by Perez Opoczinski, the poem "A Load of Shoes" by Avraham Sutzkever and the essay Yizkor, 1943 by Rachel Auerbach.

About Opoczinski, who was writing in the Warsaw Ghetto, Rosen asked, "Why, in the midst of such grim conditions, undergoing such unprecedented oppression, deprivation ... [would he] choose to write about a postman?" Audience responses included a comment on the fact that a postman goes from house to house, he knows everyone, he's the connection between the community and the outside world; another person remarked on the irony of a Jewish postman, a Jewish civil servant. Rosen picked up on both themes, noting that Jews were not allowed to be civil servants under the Nazi regime, and he expanded on the communal aspect.

Almost every wartime Jewish work focused on the "silver lining," said Rosen – at least Jews in the ghetto were among Jews only, without any non-Jews, many of whom were anti-Semitic. Opoczinski's tone, Rosen explained, was akin to that of Sholem Aleichem, bringing an insularity, a sense of humor, "writing about the ghetto as if it were the shtetl." The short story brought "a sense of the intimacy of those who are living together," he said.

In contrast, Sutzkever's poem evoked the memory of the dead. In Rosen's discussion of "A Load of Shoes," which describes piles of shoes being carted away – long before such images were seen by the world after the war – Rosen focused not just on the content, "Who have these shoes left behind?" but on the English translation. The poem was written in the Vilna Ghetto, in 1943, in Yiddish and the translator, when faced in one verse with the decision of retaining the exact meaning or the rhythm, opted for the latter. In doing so, he added a pun between the English and the Yiddish. The English reads, "The heels clatter with a fearsome din, transported from Vilna to Berlin." In Hebrew and Yiddish, din means judgment, so the translator, in choosing to use "din" to describe the noise of the shoes, is virtually screaming out that, while the Nazis may be able to take those shoes, they will be judged for doing so, said Rosen. This verse is repeated twice in the poem, he noted, and, in other disciplines this might be considered redundant, but in literature, "Repetition, meaning calling attention to saying the same thing, becomes one of the pivotal strategies."

In Yizkor, 1943 – written when there was no Jewish Warsaw left – Auerbach begins with the imagery of a flood, eliciting the story of the biblical event that destroyed most of the world. In the essay, she describes those who have been killed, young and old. She remarks that she feels the need to say Yizkor, the prayer for the dead, "Not four times a year. I feel the need to say Yizkor four times a day."

Rosen said that these three literary examples represent just some of the ways that writers use "thick language" – choice of tone, subject matter, repetition and reference to past events – to communicate their message.

Jones' presentation was also concerned with the use of language, specifically the definition of genocide and its study. He explained that Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the term. Escaping from Poland when the Nazis invaded, Lemkin ended up in the United States, at Duke University. He first used the word genocide in print in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: "By 'genocide,' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).... Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation.... It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." (This excerpt was copied from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, www.ushmm.org.)

In his lecture, Jones referred to many publications on genocide and the Holocaust, including The Historiography of Genocide, edited by U.K. Prof. Dan Stone, which looks at the development of the emerging discipline of genocide studies. In this context, Jones noted that the Holocaust has provided many of the theoretical frameworks and research strategies used in analyzing other genocides. He also highlighted some of the questions that scholars ask about the Holocaust, such as How extensive was the public/popular participation in it? and To what extent was the atmosphere of world war an enabling factor? Jones spoke of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the debate surrounding this aspect, as well as other challenges/lessons of studying genocide.

The daylong conference was sponsored by the Dave and Lil Shafran Endowment Fund of the VHEC.

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