Secondhand Witnesses

The majority of the works we have read in this class have been firsthand accounts of historical events. Memoirs like Goodbye to All That and Homage to Catalonia at times feel like pieces of that history themselves--voices salvaged from another time. Joseph Hurka's story is, as it is told even in the title, less the story of a personal witness than one of a man recovering buried history. It reminded me very much of Black Dog of Fate, in that Hurka and Balakian both try to piece together the salvageable fragments of truth to construct a narrative. It is also telling that both authors are advancing histories of overlooked regions. I for one had never learned a thing about Armenia before Black Dog of Fate, and I only knew Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring through Milan Kundera. The "bigger" events of World War I and the Cold War seem often to crowd out the histories of smaller countries. So these personal histories of families from such countries seem to carry an extra weight and significance. They speak out to that world which hasn't bothered to listen, which considered the Sudentenland as just another in a series of World War II factoids. The memoirs give voice to a nation as well as to a single family.

Hurka's and Balakian's project also seem particularly meaningful to us as writers because they haven't been witnesses to history in the same way that, say, Primo Levi or George Orwell have been. Yet Hurka and Balkian are equally dedicated to putting together and forwarding a history that they have not seen first hand. They have the imaginative capabilities to envision these worlds in exquisite detail, and they have the ability to render them in a way that makes it seem like they have seen the events themselves. Anyone has a connection to history, and they don't necessarily have to have been in the trenches to build that connection.

From last week's reading, James Baldwin stated that "the making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties...it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today" (29). It is refreshing to read Hurka's and Balakian's books because they work against this trend. Rather than reject their histories they work actively to salvage them, and by the end these two second generation immigrants do not seem on edge. They are embracing their family and their history, and they've shown us how to do it.