Allan Appel Photo
Fiona Vernal (center) with Andy Horowitz and Jewish Historical Society's Michael Dimenstein at Sunday's oral history workshop.
Hillhouse High School Jewish student Sydney Bruskin on a dare from his pals consumed his first ham sandwich in the school’s cafeteria in the 1930s, and he not only was not struck down by God, he survived very nicely.
Shifre Zamkov said she and other Holocaust survivors arriving in the U.S. may have been treated like glass, and yet by their ordeals they felt they were made of iron.
And former city alder Bob Silverman asserted that, yes, the Oak Street corridor of rickety houses and mom-and-pop businesses, destroyed in the early 1960s to make Route 34, was indeed a slum, but a living, thriving, and from the tone of the speaker’s voice, a beloved slum.
Sunday morning those personal voices from the past, illuminating and perspective-giving, and yet unlikely to appear anywhere in public records or official histories, emerged in a fascinating and entertaining workshop.
The event, which attracted upwards of 50 people, was convened at the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven in Woodbridge and was sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven (JHSGNH).
The main take-away: With new digital technologies now available, and free — but only for a year! — to everyone in the state, we all can make an addition to the past and the present by becoming an oral historian.
That’s because the new technology platform, called TheirStory!, takes care of all the tech, including providing legal permission slips, transcribing, editing, indexing, uploading to archives, and everything else, so it was advertised, short of raising a glass with you and toasting at the end of the interview.
Prof. Vernal with oral history interviewee Kinneret Chiel.
“The goal is to make everything easy,” said Andy Horowitz, who was pitching the program both as a proud child of the New Haven Jewish Community (and Yale) and in his recently appointed new role as the Connecticut State Historian.
Read here about Horowitz’s New Haven Oral History Project, which he organized soon after graduating from Yale.
The JHSGNH’s Michael Dimenstein said that while his group has been recording oral histories since its founding 48 years ago, post-pandemic it is re-invigorating its program of recording oral histories utilizing TheirStory!
He himself interviewed now 97-year-old Kinneret Chiel, who was also one of the panelists, and was a long-time New Haven Jewish educator; she was the pilot interviewee, Dimenstein said, for the society’s use of TheirStory! technology.
“There’s no substitute to hearing people in their own words,” Dimenstein said.
Chiel’s included charming and insightful recollections from her profession as an early childhood educator. “When you’re a child,” she said, “you have no sense of time. The present is insistent. I didn’t know I was living my life. I just lived it.”
She said her experience, as an interviewee, was “I just started talking [to Dimenstein and fellow interviewer JHSGNH Assistant Secretary Adele Messina] and it all unfolded, like going from room to room … like a tapestry. The interview was affirming.”
The JHSGNH is one of about 50 organizations now signed up to use TheirStory! through a one-year free licensing agreement that platform has made in collaboration the state’s history institutions. They include CT Humanities and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, and all coordinated through the University of Connecticut.
Two of its professors, Horowitz and Fiona Vernal, were on hand to evangelize for the platform and, through their asking interview-style questions of each other and a panel of interviewers and interviewees, demonstrate in part how it’s done.
Vernal is the coordinator of EPOCH, UConn’s Engaged Public, Oral, and Community Histories initiative and is the go-to person for the program.
Another project using TheirStory! is Vernal’s work interviewing members of the African-American and Jewish communities in Bloomfield – specifically to learn how and why they responded to issues like access to the housing market in the 1930s and 1940s.
What’s the key to being a good interviewer – whether in person or online?
“You have to be interested in people,” Vernal said. “And in their lives and you have to listen and let their stories unfold.”
One interviewee, reluctant at first, ended up asking her to come back again and again, adding up to 11 hours of recordings.
“For the first time she was sharing information on her own terms. For that person it was also therapeutic,” Vernal added.
One of the huge pluses of TheirStory! for Horowitz is that “you take all of the tech stuff and resolve it” so interviewers can proceed with the substance.
“I’ve heard so many nightmare stories of great tales unrecorded or somehow mangled. The tech issues [through TheirStory!] is liberating for us,” he said.
Still from oral history interview with Jewish Historical Society's archivist Marvin Barger on his Battle of the Bulge experiences
“The tradition of story telling,” said Vernal, “is always meeting new technology.”
While it started with the recording of great men only, (and the first formal archives of it were at Columbia University) it has obviously shifted and grown to include more and more diverse groups
Oral histories, she said, are poised “to play an important role in stories we tell about the pandemic, January 6,” and, she added, the upcoming November elections.
One audience member asked who owns the TheirStory!/EPOCH interviews once they are done.
The answer was they belong to the interviewer and interviewee and you can make any arrangement you want as to which archive, if any, might store them.
And Vernal emphasized that while the program is designed to attract organizations to use the platform, any individual, during the course of the year’s lease, can do the same. And she’s available and eager to help with all logistical issues in recording the lives of ordinary people. Her contact is Fiona.vernal@uconn.edu; or epoch@uconn.edu; cell: 203.687.3479
“There would never be a headline ‘New Haven man eats a ham sandwich and survives,’” said Horowitz. “The Register wouldn’t do it, but it changed his life. You could write a book about it, but it wouldn’t be in any public record,” said Horowitz.
He urged people to use the new tech available and termed the effort “acts of collective autobiography.”