English
Polish
Judith S. Kestenberg and the Escape into the (Non-)Memory of the Holocaust
Klara Naszkowska
klara.nasz@gmail.com Biocultural historian specializing in Jewish gender and women's studies, personal and oral history, and immigration studies. She received an MA in Polish Philology from the University of Warsaw in 2006, followed by a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh in 2013. In October 2019, she received a Fulbright Senior Award Scholarship from the Polish-American Fulbright Commission for the Union Theological Seminary in New York. As part of the scholarship, she carried out a research project dedicated to the forgotten Jewish pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sabina Spielrein. He continues his postdoctoral studies as a visiting professor at UTS (2020-2021, 2021-2022), the Center for Jewish History (2021-2022) and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University (2022-2023). As part of the above-mentioned affiliations, she conducts archival research and writes a habilitation book devoted to the personal stories of immigrant psychoanalysts of Jewish origin in the USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4172-9768
Center for Psychoanalytic Thought, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences; Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 18 (2022), pages: 296-321
Publication date: 2023-03-11
Abstract
This article reconstructs the biography and the complex, intercultural, and international identity of Judith S. Kestenberg (1910–1999) – a Polish Jew born in an Orthodox family in Galicia, Austria-Hungary; a medical student in Vienna; an emigrant to the United States; a pioneer of psychoanalysis and therapeutic work with Holocaust survivors, dealing with the trauma of a daughter of Holocaust victims; and, last but not least, a mother and wife. The text presents the complex circumstances of Kestenberg’s departure from Austria in mid-1937 and her metaphorical escapes from the unbearable reality of the war and the Holocaust, as well as her complicated, ambiguous, and evolving attitude toward the losses and traumas suffered as a result of the war, the Holocaust, and the emigration, as well as toward Jewish and Polish identity. The article presents Kerstenberg’s personal attitude toward the Shoah which resulted from her losing her parents and her obsessive dedication to therapeutic work with the Holocaust survivors. During the first post-war decades in the milieus of Jewish survivors, immigrants, and even mental health professionals (including psychoanalysts) dominant was the conviction that it was better to forget the war, trauma, and loss. In 1968 Kestenberg began to create a new field of knowledge dedicated to survivors who had experienced wartime persecutions at a very young age. She believed that the only way to deal with the difficult past events was to talk about them, acknowledge them, and preserve them in the individual and collective memory.
The author reconstructed the history of Kestenberg’s family history and her biography on the basis of archival sources. Official historical sources usually ignore the voices and experiences of minorities, including women, Jews, immigrants, and non-citizens. This is why this article utilizes personal history materials such as memoirs, letters, published and unpublished interviews, and oral history (speeches, and the conversations I have had) as well as Kestenberg’s texts about her research on survivors.
Keywords
Judith S. Kestenberg, extermination of Jews, Holocaust, emigration, identity, escape, trauma, psychoanalysis, oral history, personal history, feminism
References
Źródła archiwalne / Archival sources
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Niepublikowana rozmowa z Janet Kestenberg Amighi przeprowadzona przez Klarę Na- szkowską, Nowy Jork, 22 IV 2021 r.
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