Between Art and Testimony: Transforming Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors into Young Adult Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Works of historical fiction and creative non-fiction written about the Holocaust continue to occupy an important place in both the literary and history curricula in K to 12 schools. In discussion with author Kathy Kacer, I describe the particular challenges of transforming oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors into young adult (YA) narratives including the ways in which these narratives are mitigated by the adult desire to educate and protect and by the undeniable influence of the publication of the diary of Anne Frank. By taking up the problem of bearing literary witness as a mode of pedagogical address through Spargo’s notion of vigilant memory and his reformulation of Levinasian ethics into terms of mourning, I demonstrate how oral histories directly or indirectly embedded in YA Holocaust narratives, might address the epistemological consequences of the Holocaust, specifically for invoking an ethical and social responsibility for the other through a resistance to consolation as a conventional form of commemoration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".