LISTENING WELL

How to use listening skills to find inspiration and enrichment.

Morris based her novels The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka’s Journey on the emotional, intimate details told to her by Holocaust survivors, who were eager for her to hear their stories. In a heartfelt, occasionally self-congratulatory memoir, the author extols the act of listening as an expression of love and empathy. Growing up in New Zealand, she was taught that children should be seen and not heard. “As an inquisitive child, and one who already instinctively understood the value of the story, and in hearing what others had to say, this had the opposite effect on me,” she recalls. “I wanted to know what it was adults talked about, wanted to know everything.” That inquisitiveness has transformed her into what she calls an active listener, for which she has devised some basic rules: “to concentrate, to understand, to respond, to remember what is being said, to withhold judgment or opinion.” Too often, she writes, we listen to another person only to look for an opening in which to express our own ideas. Listening, though, whether to elders, children, or one’s own feelings, is an act of generosity and attention. For more than 20 years as an office manager in the social work department of a Melbourne hospital, she came into contact with patients in considerable distress. “To have someone listening without being personally connected to them,” she discovered, “unleashed a torrent of past and present concerns.” Offering comfort and support for patients and caregivers, she was praised as an “honorary social worker.” Her most significant act of listening came in her relationship with Lale Sokolov, the tattooist she memorialized in The Tattooist and a central character in her memoir. She recounts their growing closeness over the three years that she visited with him and her sensitivity in helping him relate the traumatic details of his life.

A celebration of human connection.