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Real life vs Alternate Reality (Click to enlarge) |
Back in 1988, when I was recording my grandfather's war stories, he said this:
"Well so, coming back — I am talking in disorderly way because I didn’t prepare all this, so it will be a hell-of-a-time for you to put this in order."
Yeah, no kidding, Grandpa Arthur.
Because it's hard to capture tone of voice in writing, I'll just tell folks how I sound right now: rueful and a little worn-out. I'm not being rude (well, maybe I am, but only a little). I loved and respected my grandfather, but there is no denying that he sometimes had unreasonable expectations.
Anyway, "hell-of-a-time" is right. I am nearly 4 years into this project, and it's still not done. Occasionally, I wonder if it will ever be done, and sometimes I get just so sick of it, but then I discover some new clue, and my interest flares back to life, burning as brightly as ever.
I recorded Grandpa the summer after my freshman year in college, and on tape I asked maybe two or three questions while I was recording him, and God, I was so young and just so ... ignorant. Now I have a million questions and I could kick myself because those questions never even occurred to me at the time, and now they will remain forever unanswered because he died nearly three decades ago.
Well, at least I was curious and motivated enough to ask for his stories in the first place, and I'm grateful for that experience, but the tapes would have been orders of magnitude better if I'd brought along an experienced oral historian. But, back then, I didn't know such people existed, and who knows if Grandpa would have agreed to talk to one.
I was always interested in the war, because I knew my grandparents had escaped the Nazis and survived, but beyond thumbing through the pictures in my dad's Time-Life WW2 books, and reading a couple of novels, (including one for kids*), I had no real understanding of WW2. Dad gave me a copy of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 13 or 14, but I never got past the first 20 pages.
The tapes sat around until I was a senior, and my first inkling that I had a treasure in my possession occurred when I mentioned them to the professor teaching my Holocaust class (Dr. Penny Gold, now Professor Emeritus at Knox College) and I wondered if maybe I could use them in some manner for my final research project.
Dr. Gold's eyes widened, and then she got really excited, revealing her inner Indiana Jones. She was a far better teacher and historian than that fictional archeologist, though - she wasn't just excited that this artifact had been unearthed, she was excited on my behalf.
This was around the time the movement to gather oral histories from those who experienced WW2 personally, from the soldiers, the holocaust survivors, from those who were there first started to gain momentum. Three years later, Steven Spielberg founded the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Its charter was to videotape 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses.
Dr. Gold suggested that I transcribe the tapes, and because she was far more aware of just how much work transcribing audio sources can be than I was, she offered to let me reduce the required length of my term paper from ... 15 or 20? pages down to 10.
The paper itself ended up barely 10 pages, but with the transcription, the project ended up somewhere north of 40 pages. And yes, I got an A.
Like my professor, my family was excited by my project. I sent it to my mom, and it ended up being a little earth-shaking for her, because Grandpa had told me many things he had never told his own kids. The war had been an extremely painful and dangerous time for my grandparents, and they mostly didn't talk about it. I asked her to send a copy to Grandpa, and she did that, but also sent one to my aunt, and just about anyone else who showed even the slightest interest. It was really clear that Mom was impressed, excited, and even proud of my work, and that felt pretty great.
Unlike everyone else in the family, my grandfather was not excited.
I'd expected him to be pleased that I had transcribed the tapes of his stories, that I had even used them in scholarly research, and he was glad of it, I think. But mostly, he was ... disappointed.
He didn't like that his grammar wasn't perfect, that it—as is typical of oral sources— was full of sentence fragments, and was a little choppy. He didn't like that I hadn't rearranged his stories into chronological order or placed them in a historical context. Grandpa even called me and asked that I please do two things: to clean up his grammar, and to put the stories in order. He even used a little guilt: I don't remember his exact words, but it was something like, "It would mean so much to me, if you did this one thing for me before I die."
I said no, and the disappointment was thick in Grandpa's silence. I didn't feel guilty (not yet, anyway), and in a rare instance of self-confidence, I didn't let it bother me (much). He had no clue how much work I'd already put into it. The transcript alone took me 20 or 30 hours to complete (I'm sure I annoyed the other students in the computer lab, with my constant play-stop-rewind-play on my Walkman). I also simply didn't have time. I still had the final trimester of my final year of college to go, then I needed to find a job (a daunting task for someone with an English degree). And, frankly, I was out of steam.
I also disagreed with him. When transcribing oral history, you present what the subject really said, not what they wished they had said.
I figured I'd pick it back up again someday, but then Grandpa died in 1996, and I blinked and 25 years had gone by and I wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo (my daughter had completed two novels before she graduated from HS, and I wanted to keep up with her), and Grandpa's stories seemed like a natural fit.
And now, all these years after Grandpa's phone call, I feel guilty that I didn't even try to fulfill what was kinda-sorta a dying wish. Because I totally could have edited it the way he wanted, but in a separate document from the transcript (I haven't budged in my belief that a transcript should be the exact text of an audio source). But the other part? Putting it in order, and placing it in a historical context?
Oof.
If I've learned anything in the almost 4 years since I picked up this project again, it's that there was no possible way I could have fulfilled his second request before he died, because I lacked both the necessary experience and, more importantly, the tools to do it quickly.
But by 2021, the state of the technology had caught up with my needs, I had decades more experience and knowledge, and I was able to complete that part of the project in less than three years. I'm guessing that if I had started it in 1991 after that phone call with Grandpa, it would have taken at least 10 years to accomplish what I later did in three.
I used the internet to research, to accurately identify the correct books to read, movies and TV shows to watch, even newspaper archives. A friend with university access even found information on medical knowledge from the 1940s. Instead of stumbling upon the occasional useful historical photo, I found thousands of photos with just seconds of work. The internet also allowed me to find and build friendships with historians all over the world.
Computers have progressed, too. I can do keyword searches through entire books in seconds. I can listen to books while I'm out walking, and bookmark important passages in audiobooks without even having to stop exercising. Hell, I can even dictate notes in my audiobooks now. You couldn't do that back when we were using Books on Tape instead of Audible.
Now, imagine doing all that with the shots-in-the-dark that are card catalogs and inter-library loan, and having to manually skim entire paper books (probably missing key information) for hints and clues, without the ability to do keyword searches using a computer? Or translating the French and Polish letters in Grandpa's immigration folder, with nothing more than a dictionary?
I'm beginning to think that my 10-year estimate was wildly optimistic, and I'd have been lucky to finish it in less than 15.
* Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, about a gold heist in Norway, pulled off by children on sleds, trying to protect the Norwegian treasury from the Nazis. It's a wonderful book.