"Personal feelings or recollections can challenge traditional views and bring history to life." How effective have representations of personal feelings or recollections been in challenging traditional views and bringing history to life in the texts you have engaged with in this elective?.
History is a traditionally considered to be a reconstruction of the past told through factual evidence, while memory is based on perspective, which can be altered by emotions, experiences and time. However, it is the complex interplay between history and memory that allows one to construct a clear representation of the past through the combination of objective and subjective views. The Fiftieth Gate, a non-fiction biography written by Mark Baker, and the film Everything Is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schreiber, both portray how personal recollections can challenge the traditional documented history of the Holocaust, colored by the biases and opinions of the author of the story. The intricate web of subjectivity and objectivity in these texts creates a more thorough understanding of the dynamic nature of history and memory, thus bringing history to life for a contemporary audience. .
The Fiftieth Gate, written by Mark Baker, is a biography of Baker's parents' childhoods during the Holocaust, and combines their personal memory with documented history of the Holocaust. In this biography Baker uses water based imagery in "For my father, the rivers have not thawed, until now, when his words break out from their glacial silence, releasing a torrent whose flow runs backwards into his darkest nights " to effectively communicate the horrors hidden within Baker's father Yossl and the damage memories can still inflict so many years after the event. This is further reinforced when Baker describes how "Through the fog and mist he hugs scarred memories to his chest, whispering bitter secrets unearthed from their hibernation.