(2016) and coeditor of Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (2018). She is also part of the editorial team for the journal Oral History.
Dodd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Feeling Memory: Remembering Wartime Childhoods in France, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Feeling Memory at the Columbia University Press website.Édith’s family lost their possessions and their home in an air raid on Cambrai in 1944; this followed the devastating death of her brother also under the bombs. Édith’s mother was ill with depression, did not claim any compensation, and with her three remaining children struggled in the aftermath of these calamities. Édith described her clothing: “We’d pull in our sleeves like this, to do that [tucking her sleeves around her elbows, and holding her arms close to her body to hide the imagined holes]. To go to school. To go to Communion. It’s not much fun, when you’ve got holes in your shoes, to get down on your knees.” The priest told her to have humility in the face of her suffering, and the nuns berated her sister (Édith left school as soon as she could) for the state of her clothing. Their poverty – and their mother’s incapacity – was exposed to public view, and judgement was cast on their failure to live up to expectations of propriety and humility. Édith told the story with a smile; but why tell it at all unless it communicated something – about injustice, pain, shame – to the listener?Page 99 is somewhat representative of my approach to thinking about personal memories of the Second World War as lived by children in France. On this page, we encounter three young girls – Édith, Simone, and Lucienne – whose experiences of upheaval generated lasting emotional responses. It is through the narration of such experiences that we can, to some extent, read the emotional landscape of the past. We may not come to know how the past felt, but by listening with care we can feel our way into worlds beyond our own. Memories are made of feeling. This idea is present on page 99 and underpins the whole book.
In other ways, it is not representative. Its focus is on three experiences of shame which are linked to the destitution caused by bombing. I’ve dealt with bombing before. So a cursory glance at page 99 might lead readers to think ‘Another book about bombing!’ But while the allied bombing of France during the Second World War does feature in Feeling Memory, my underlying goal was to explore and do justice to the lives beyond bombing that even those children who were bombed lived.
Feeling Memory draws on a wider corpus of recorded oral histories in geographical and social terms than page 99 might suggest. The book uses the stories of contented children, bereaved children, Jewish children of different backgrounds, children who were refugees, children who were interned, rich and poor, rural and urban, children who were happily evacuated, children who joked, laughed, danced… collected frogs, played wargames, mocked their teachers, ate carrot jam, made up lies, saw things they shouldn’t have, got angry, got scared, and chose to recount their stories years later.
Page 99 falls within the first part of the book ‘Memories Felt’, in a chapter called ‘Affects and Intensities’ that tracks how affective states are indirectly communicated through the shape and content of memory stories. As on page 99, I take the anecdotes people tell as droplets of meaning: they say something beyond the specifics of the situation. Often, that something is about feeling, and it matters. ‘Memories Felt’ is followed by three more parts: ‘Memories Located’, ‘Memories Told’ and ‘Memories Lived’. Together these illuminate a felt realm of experience which is both a collective story of war through children’s eyes and an expression of deep individuation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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