THE LISTENER

A Holocaust survivor’s story shared through the generations.

Halifax-based Oore (French/Dalhousie Univ.; co-author: Marie-Claire Blais: An Annotated Bibliography, 1998) was born in Poland to a mother who escaped the fate of so many others in the Warsaw ghetto at least in part because she looked Aryan and was deemed attractive by those standards, marrying a gentile officer. The horrors that she witnessed could be considered unspeakable, yet she repeated them often to her daughter, beginning when she was 4 years old. “How could this apparently ‘normal’ woman tell such stories to a child?” the author wonders. “Though it seems to me she could not help but tell them. What choice did she have? What choice did I have?” None, Oore ultimately decided. Though she initially felt incapable of understanding the stories and the motive for sharing them, and later felt unworthy of sharing the story because the suffering was not hers, she believed that she must become the vessel for the story and that she would discover the value in sharing it with her own children. “She was letting go; the story was now truly in my possession,” writes the author. “The understanding was that I would tell the story. That was the deal: the story was now mine, and I had the moral obligation to tell it.” Oore also delves into how her mother’s “deep dislike of Jews, her self-hatred, came as an additional ‘fringe benefit’ of the story and has accompanied me all my life.” The author is older than her mother was when the storytelling began, and in sharing the story with her own adult children, she was able to find catharsis. It’s a slim memoir, but one that is instructive about the necessity of passing stories down to keep them alive.

Oore demonstrates the persistence of memory and the pervasiveness of evil.