Listening

I had a remarkable experience the other day when, while googling something else entirely, I stumbled across a recording of President Benjamin Harrison, the twenty-third president of the United States. He was in the White House when my grandparents were children, from 1889 to 1893, and, although he was not the first of our presidents to have his voice recorded—that would be Rutherford B. Hayes, who was in office from 1877 to 1881—he is the oldest of our presidents a recording of whose voice has survived. It’s a short recording made on an Edison phonograph wax cylinder (to listen, click here), but it felt amazing to hear the voice of a man my grandmother would have thought of roughly in the same way I think of Dwight Eisenhower: as the president of my earliest childhood. Today forgotten by most, Harrison was nonetheless linked to our country’s past in two important ways other than with respect to his own service to the nation: he was our only president whose grandfather was also president (William Henry Harrison was president for about a month in 1841 before he died in office) and he was the great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison V, who was one of our nation’s founders and who, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. So how amazing an experience was that—hearing the actual voice of a man whose grandfather’s dad would have considered Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as his peers, maybe even as his pals. It isn’t much to listen to, the recording—just slightly over half a minute in length—but it somehow brought our nation’s past into my study in a way that felt simultaneously mysterious, intriguing, and satisfying.

And that got me to wondering who else’s voice is out there to hear. In our highly digitized age, of course, there’s too much, not too little, of everybody to listen to: a quick google-search for “voice recordings of Barack Obama” undertaken by myself took exactly 0.51 seconds to yield 4,810,000 results. But there are also unexpected people to listen to. Robert Browning’s voice was recorded in 1889, as was Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1890 (and by Thomas Edison himself). Queen Victoria’s voice was preserved too: click here to take a listen. Thomas Edison even managed to record the voice of Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire.

In their own category would be the recordings of Black Americans who had actually been slaves in the Old South as preserved and available to all on the website of the Library of Congress (click here). Readers with extremely good memories will recall that I wrote about the experience of discovering and listening to those recordings back in 2008 (click here to revisit those comments). The short version of the story is that the Federal Writers’ Project (a part of the Works Project Administration in the 1930s) undertook as one of its projects to locate still-living former slaves from pre-Civil War days and to record their stories so that they could be preserved for later generations to consider. Almost amazingly, they found over two thousand such people still alive in the nation—this was a full seventy years after the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in this nation—and many were more than willing to talk. The results were amazing—seventeen large volumes collectively called Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves—which have been abridged over the years into many single volumes (click here for an example of such a volume offered as a free e-book on amazon.com). But even more compelling than reading their stories was listening to them: wax cylinder recordings were made of many of these interviews, all of which should be required listening for all citizens hoping for our nation to transcend the racial divide that still, even now, characterizes so much of American society. To read about slavery, after all, is one thing. But to hear men and women who themselves were slaves telling their story is an entirely different experience, one I recommend to all. On Pesach, we make a big deal out of the thought that tradition bids us so fully to identify with the Israelites slaves that we come to consider their redemption to be our own as well. But how many of us have listened to actual enslaved persons tell their story? And then, while I was busy amusing myself by listening to Queen Victoria and Robbie Burns, Yom Hashoah was upon us. And that cast all the above in a different light.

I grew up in a world of survivors. Every Jewish American my age did, or at least those of us did who grew up in urban settings like New York or in neighborhoods like Forest Hills. I’ve often told the story—including just the other night at Shelter Rock—of my mother taking me aside as a young boy and warning me, gently but firmly, against quizzing the survivor parents of my friends from elementary school about their wartime experiences. My mom meant it as a kindness, feeling that it would only be cruel to ask people who had suffered such terribleness and such barbarism to revisit their own stories instead of allowing them to grow past the past into new American lives featuring bright American futures. But even if I agreed, albeit reluctantly, to obey my mother and not to ask the survivors I encountered about the camps or the circumstances of their personal survival, I still heard their voices. And their voices were amazing. I can hear them still too in all their strange linguistic variegation. In one home, they spoke a strange and wonderful patois of Yiddish, Polish, French, and English. In another they spoke a kind of English in which every third word was actually German. A third was similar, except that those every-third-words were Hungarian ones. A fourth home I frequented featured Rumanian as the “third language,” i.e., the one that wasn’t Yiddish or English. I spent those years listening to all those strange linguistic fruit salads and trying to figure out how the speakers themselves knew which language to draw which word from. And, in retrospect a bit oddly, wishing I could speak like that myself.

And then, eventually, I did learn their stories. It took a while. I became a teenager, and adolescent-me was not quite as obedient to my mother’s instructions as boy-me had been. These were the years that I was surreptitiously reading as much Shoah-based literature as I could find, starting with André Schwarz Bart’s The Last of the Just and Leon Uris’s Mila-18 and moving forward from there. And so I began a kind of two-tiered journey through my own adolescence, getting the information I needed and wanted about the Shoah from books but hearing the voices of so many survivors in those days that I don’t think I can remember them all now by name.

As the years have passed, the din has quieted down. It’s been years since I met a survivor who couldn’t speak English easily and well. My need to read maximally about every aspect of the Holocaust has died down too over the years, but without ever abating entirely. But as the survivor community has dwindled, my parallel need to hear them speak has only become more intense. I listened carefully the other evening to an interview conducted by Andrew Silow-Carroll of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency featuring Alex Groth, now a retired professor who taught for decades at the University of California at Davis but once a child in the Warsaw Ghetto. He spoke clearly and well, recalling details and incidents from his childhood in hell, and making certain unexpected assertions about life that only someone who had been present on the scene would be able to make. Other than that, though, he didn’t say anything I hadn’t read elsewhere. And yet the experience of hearing his voice, of hearing the voice of a man who was once a boy in the place that looms so large in my own consciousness—that was just amazing. And far more amazing, at least for me personally, than hearing what Queen Victoria sounded like.

Eventually, the only way to hear survivors tell their stories will be digitally. The patois of their homes when I was a boy is already a thing of the past. As the numbers dwindle and their collective voice becomes increasingly muted, our concomitant responsibility to listen all the more carefully will wax larger and greater. In these coming years, we will need to strain to hear every surviving survivor tell his or her tale, and in that way honoring the dead not by listening to Edison wax cylinders, but by listening to the actual voices of actual people for as long as they are audible.