| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Alexandra Garbarini. Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 262. $45.00.
Alexandra Garbarini has produced an engaging interpretation of diaries as an untapped archive of Jewish experiences in the later years of World War II. As a near contemporaneous source, individual diaries and group witness chronicles, such as the Oneg Shabbes underground archive from the Warsaw ghetto, occupy a rather privileged status among scholars of Holocaust representation, who regard them as comparatively more authentic and visceral accounts of Jewish wartime responses than postwar testimony, memoirs, and other autobiographical narratives. Garbarini does not depart from this critique. She ascribes to her diarists the vague vocation of "meaning makers" that they themselves agonizingly struggled to claim. Diary writing gave Jews in hiding and in ghettos a literary agency—as amateur journalists, family historians, and community chroniclers—that historians have neglected. Compulsive and sustained acts of diary writing, argues Garbarini, can provide new, experiential source material for historians and literary scholars about Jewish everyday life in the Holocaust.	1
Based on her reading of one hundred, mainly unpublished, diaries of Jews in Eastern Europe, and in Germany and France, Garbarini argues that the desire to maintain diaries was a normative practice, a tradition that continued European cultural production of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Garbarini's first chapter on history and theory thus sets up a reading context for the diaries, for their writing as a secular practice, and as a constructed vessel of self-realization from various cultural, religious, social, and political influences. This chapter usefully elucidates tensions between the witness as a teller of objective and subjective truths and the afflicted self as a reluctant writer in combat with language to represent extremity.	. . .

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