Category: Karl Jacoby

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction — by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us — that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories — our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones — and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?