Someone I had never heard of turns out to be a public intellectual in Australia with a dozen accessible, popular books to her name.

Dr Ruth Wajnryb turned up to deal with a giggly Geraldine Doogue on Radio National this morning and promote Cheerio Tom, Dick and Harry, about recently obsolete words. From Allen and Unwin. The audio is here; click on the “third hour” and pick the item up half way across the slider.

With English as her second language, she described the confusion of starting work and hearing phrases like “Bob’s your uncle” and “Blind Freddy could do that”. She thought they were literal statements. And yet – amazingly – she spoke impeccably academic but idiomatic English, with not the tiniest traces of an accent to my ears. I would have said middle class, educated, young end of baby boomer, probably Sydney, reads a lot, autonomous, verbally oriented, quizzical, good sense of humour.

But she wrote a book called The Silence:

“A passionate and highly readable analysis of the unspoken vocabulary of trauma among families of survivors.

Silence can be a powerful form of communication. It is often the form that communication takes in the wake of unspeakable trauma. After a half a century, the Holocaust still dominates the homes of survivors and their families. Memory haunts and permeates the home, conditioning survivors’ thoughts, their behaviour, their responses to their family, their reactions to government and authority. Applied linguist and academic Dr. Ruth Wajnryb grew up in such a home, living the aftermath of her parents’ war as they strove to reconstruct their lives in the wake of a nightmare that could not be talked about.

Using interviews with children of survivors, The Silence explores the process of communication in survivor families from the perspective of the post-war generation. It maps the interconnections of narrative and trauma, and lays bare the oblique and roundabout pathways where talk fragments and disappears into the cracks. Ruth Wajnryb retrieves the fragments and gives words, meaning and a larger coherence to a silence suffered quietly in countless homes. Along the way, we learn her own story and that of her generation, and understand in a broader sense how trauma is transmitted and how it touches and impacts on talk in families. Understanding the language of silence, she believes, is a first step to healing. The Silence is an attempt to understand how trauma and communication interconnect. Given the reality of human exile and uprootedness, communication across the boundaries of culture and trauma is a major social issue of the new millennium.”

This reminds me of my English Professor, R.W.V. Elliott, at Flinders University in the late Sixties. A middle aged gent in cardigans, often dapper, given to supplying sherry to his hippified students, correct and friendly, very very British in that Inter-war Oxbridge way. I had minimal contact with him, being a lowly undergraduate and uncommitted to the runes and Anglo-Saxon studies he taught. He once startled me by asking if the cloth hat I wore at the time was “for religious reasons.” I didn’t know what he meant.

Years later I was told he was a refugee, a German Jew who escaped just before his world was exterminated. His book, Runes, an Introduction, was published in 1959 and is still cited today. His diffidence is revealed in this 1964 photo, in which he is perched on the right hand corner of the table. You can also see that I viewed him through very young eyes.

Toodle-pip.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.