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In the “Methodological Notes” featured as an appendix, Arlene Stein describes how Reluctant Witnesses came about. It didn’t begin as a scholarly project. It began as a personal quest: a search for her family’s hidden past and her own place in the history of that family. “I began this project in an autobiographical vein,” she explains, “trying to figure out my relationship to a painful past; it became a sociological project somewhat later” (p. 186). Starting out as what she calls a history detective, Stein draws on her skills as a sociologist as her quest takes shape.
Beginning with her father and the enigma of his past (“Who was Lawrence Stein… and what was the world he came from?”), Stein discovers a web of relationships defined by a “traumatic inheritance” (p. 3) that at first didn’t even have a name. When Stein was a child, it was officially referred to as the destruction of European Jewry or the Jewish genocide. But when people she knew talked, if they talked at all, it was about “the war.” Sometimes they mentioned “our tragedy,” or “the catastrophe,” or gestured vaguely toward a time “back then.” Not until the late 1960s, when she came of age, did the tragedy in question finally get a name that everyone could recognize: it was called the Holocaust. From her initial need to know who her father was, how his past had shaped him, and, by extension, how that past had shaped her relationship to him, Stein’s quest evolved to explore how the memory of the Jewish genocide changed from a virtual “conspiracy of silence” in the immediate postwar years to become “a prominent part of the American cultural landscape” (p. 13) by the 1980s.
This emergence of a hidden past, as whispered secrets entered public knowledge, is the history that Stein records. Proceeding chronologically over six chapters, she traces what she calls “the rise of Holocaust consciousness,” the process by which traumatic experiences that seemed unspeakable in the immediate aftermath of the events eventually