I had, unfortunately, to pause my graveyard project because of my knee surgery and subsequent rehab. I am reliably informed that they will still be there come the spring, so I will recommence then. I might go and take a few photos in the snow, just to see what it looks like in the depths of a dead winter.
Occasionally, things unexpectedly intersect. On my sabbatical I am looking primarily at two different projects. My WW2 book about the human experience of war – and especially the emotional dimension – is being written. I am looking at life stories, memories, diaries, photos, letters and recollections to try and piece together the inner world of combatants and civilians, and the way the emotional turmoil of war found expression in a range of behaviours, both virtuous and vicious, life-affirming and life-destroying.
My other project is thinking about what it would look like if historians put love and compassion for the dead at the centre of their work. What can we learn from those who take care of the dead – both their physical remains and their memories – that we might fruitfully incorporate into our professional practices as historians. With this in mind, the book will tentatively look something like this:
- Hesed and the calling of the Historian (Hesed is a Jewish idea about showing loving kindness towards the dead, and was the original idea behind this whole book)
- Caring for the unknown and unclaimed dead: how do funeral homes, churches, municipal authorities deal with the dead bodies of those people who have no one to bury them? Of bodies of people who have no identity?
- What rights do the dead have?
- Spaces for the dead: how and where are the dead buried, remembered, rendered visible and invisible by our public spaces? State rituals? Obituaries? Spontaneous memorials? Statues? Included in this will be some of the ways in which different organisations and individuals have attempted to remember victims of state power: for example the “Gathering the Fragments” project at Yad Vashem (https://www.yadvashem.org/gathering-fragments.html) , and the Stolperstein Project (https://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/) . There are more but you will have to wait for the book!
Then I will think about how this should affect our practices as historians, and how this might shape what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. In particular, I will think about what we can/should say about those whom we know little or nothing about? What can/should we say about those about whom we know too much? Or about whom there is universal vilification? Should we narrate fictional stories around these lives, when so little is known? Should we be making them visible, or leaving them invisible?
Then I will conclude with some reflections on my tending the graves project, and what this meant to me as human and as historian, to spend time with the the dead and their gravestones. There will not be a lot of reading for this project, but a lot of thinking, reflecting, musing etc. This is almost the exact opposite of my WW2 project, which has sooooo much reading its not even funny. I have just cut myself off from reading anymore (although that didn’t last long as I just ordered three more books to read), but on the whole I am just going to write now (I have just over half of it written, although I have written waaaay too much already…)
Anyway I am digressing, as usual.
The intersection of my two projects came when I was writing about children, childhood and war, and in particular the experiences of orphans and being orphaned. I was reading the amazing book “Last Witnesses” by Svetlana Alexievich (my very favourite historian!) which is about how adults remembered their wartime experiences when they were children. The stories are heartbreaking, poignant, inspiring, brutal, tragic, traumatic.
I came across this little passage in one story. Remembering her life in the orphanage during the war when she was 7, Lilia Melnikova recalls,
We were all very glad that she had found her brother, because we all had somebody, and she didn’t have anybody. I, for instance, had two sisters, someone else had a brother, or cousins. Those who didn’t have anybody would decide: you be my brother, or you be my sister. And then they would protect and take care of each other. In our orphanage there were eleven Tamaras…Their last names were Tamara Unknown, Tamara Strange, Tamara Nameless, Tamara Big, and Tamara Small…
There is so much about this little snippet to love, so much to lament, and so much more to be said: about belonging, and solidarity and losing and finding. And how and why did the Tamaras get their last names? And what were the names of the other Tamaras?
I have been thinking a lot about the Eleven Tamaras.
And so I am going – over the next few weeks – to blog about the eleven Tamaras, and explore ways in which we might recover them, tell their stories, name them, show them compassion and care.
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