The Incomplete Witness

I found (as I'd guess most of us did) that Mr. Hurka's text was most similar to Hope Against Hope in that they both place the author in the role of the secondhand witness (as Chris discussed in his blog post). However, I found that Hurka had a bit of a disadvantage only because he was writing from a generation behind his father and Mira, and thus, there were pieces of his witnessing that were missing.

This is not to disparage the book (which I thought was fascinating), it was just interesting to see the difference in detail between Mandelstam and Hurka given that they were covering a lot of the same ground (Communist oppression) from the same secondhand standpoint. It seemed Hurka wasn't able to get into the same level of specificity and detail that Mandelstam was, and at times, it distanced me from the trauma and terror of the period his father must have lived. The closeness that Mandelstam had to the situation allowed her to report with much greater clarity, and also to get into each episode of her husband's struggle with more depth. Hurka seems at times only able to scratch the surface (also in part because his Father doesn't or cannot tell him certain things).

I wonder how this relates to how the act of witnessing can be diluted and weakened by the passing of time. We live in an age of instantaneous information, so anyone can bare witness to anything and have it saved online and dispersed to a large group of people (which can be good or bad, depending on circumstances, but that's another argument). But when I think back on past traumas or more restrictive societies (North Korea, Turkey cracking down on social media), I wonder how much we'll ever be able to understand if the only witnesses we have come generations after the events have occurred. It seems that the generational gap and subsequently less detailed account/witnessing may make it easier for us to overlook or downplay atrocities that we know less about (with Hurka, we already have a great understanding of how oppressing Soviet-style communism was from other texts).