Writing the Break: Bea Stadtler's Reconstructing the Past (1976)

In Reconstructing the Past, a 1976 photograph that the Cleveland-based writer and oral historian Bea Stadtler likely shot while traveling through Israel, an elderly archaeologist pieces ceramic shards back together to re-shape what was once a vessel. In the photograph, the fragments the archaeologist cradles between his fingertips evoke the ruptures of a legacy of suffering. These pieces are what allow him to re-shape the once-whole vessel and what guide him as he makes the curving forms of the past visible and meaningful again. Building on her project to make a ruptured past present, Stadtler also began interviewing Eastern-European Holocaust survivors for the American Jewish Committee. By listening, and by acting as witness, she encouraged the survivors she interviewed to break thirty years of relative silence by delving deep into the shadows of suffering; she molded unheard memories into narrative sequences that bring excruciating suffering to light; she preserved long-buried histories of unimaginable pain as written and recorded documents. In this paper, I suggest that the fragmented, discontinuous histories that surface in these intersecting projects leave us with questions about how we conserve the darkest legacies of history—about how we contain and hold the fractures of the past, about how we carry them forward into the present: what remains hidden when we cover over the fissures of history? What do we gain when we approach the past in a way that makes visible the inner conflicts that shape who we are and reveals, rather than resolves, the irreconcilable and untranslatable?