NYT: Oral History Project Wants Nation of Interviewers

MICHAEL BRICK (New York Times) writes:

On this recording, Mr. Isay is making an oral history of his own family, but he is also using the interview as a trial run for a much broader project: to democratize the craft of oral history and simultaneously capture a chronicle of ordinary life in our times comparable to the body of work produced by the Works Progress Administration two generations ago.

This will turn on his ability to persuade ordinary people, starting with New Yorkers, to speak of raw workaday joy and anguish, outside their homes or neighborhood bars, in the presence of a microphone, a recording device, a friend and a stranger. It also turns on his ability to teach untrained interviewers the techniques that can elicit candid stories and unvarnished emotions.

"This is our beachhead against `The Bachelor' " Mr. Isay said, referring to the reality television show. "It's about reminding America what kind of stories are interesting and meaningful and important."

Starting in October, in Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal, Mr. Isay plans to build something of a quiet public confessional in the center of the motion and tumult — and ordinariness — of daily commuting.

Oral History Project Wants Nation of Interviewers
By MICHAEL BRICK

he voice on the recording quivers and warbles and shows the speaker's age, which is 88. The speaker is asked who he is.

"I'm Sandy Birnbaum," the voice replies. "I'm a retired biomedical scientist, have been retired for some time."

Mr. Birnbaum says that he is living a very comfortable life. But soon he will reveal things that the word "comfortable" hides — everyday agonies, experienced and unspoken pretty much universally.

The questioner, David Isay, draws Mr. Birnbaum out. Mr. Isay, a grandson of Mr. Birnbaum's wife's sister, is a practiced interviewer, best known for making oral history and documentary projects broadcast on National Public Radio.

On this recording, Mr. Isay is making an oral history of his own family, but he is also using the interview as a trial run for a much broader project: to democratize the craft of oral history and simultaneously capture a chronicle of ordinary life in our times comparable to the body of work produced by the Works Progress Administration two generations ago.

This will turn on his ability to persuade ordinary people, starting with New Yorkers, to speak of raw workaday joy and anguish, outside their homes or neighborhood bars, in the presence of a microphone, a recording device, a friend and a stranger. It also turns on his ability to teach untrained interviewers the techniques that can elicit candid stories and unvarnished emotions.

"This is our beachhead against `The Bachelor' " Mr. Isay said, referring to the reality television show. "It's about reminding America what kind of stories are interesting and meaningful and important."

Starting in October, in Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal, Mr. Isay plans to build something of a quiet public confessional in the center of the motion and tumult — and ordinariness — of daily commuting.

People rushing from train to street will move past a six-by-eight-foot box of gray sheet metal wrapped in a translucent skin with a honeycomb pattern. Stopping to inspect the booth, they may push a button activating a speaker and playing aloud an edited sample oral history interview.

"If you see it from a distance, you'll see this glowing box with these car speakers," said Eric A. Liftin, an architect with Mesh Architectures in New York who was involved in designing the box. "Once you go inside, it's going to be a wood environment, totally different, what you would call warm."

Mr. Isay hopes that people will stop long enough to make an appointment to go inside, bringing a family member or friend to sit in simple wooden chairs beside a table with two microphones. In the room, a trained mediator will quickly teach them a few interviewing techniques — chief among these is not interrupting — then monitor recording equipment as one person interviews the other. The whole process will take three-quarters of an hour.

A copy of the recording will be made on compact disk for the participants to keep, and another copy will become part of an archive.

Another booth is planned for downtown at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, and Mr. Isay hopes to place similar booths in libraries and other public places around the country and to send a convoy of movable booths to county fairs and the like.

So far, the only financing is a $50,000 grant to Mr. Isay's nonprofit group, Sound Portraits, from the Rockefeller Foundation. But money may not be the biggest problem. Experts in the field of oral history, including some strong supporters of Mr. Isay, say that his project must overcome nonfinancial challenges to realize the scope of its ambition.

"It's oral history writ large," said Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University and a professed admirer of Mr. Isay. She said that the project's fate rests with Mr. Isay's ability to train the mediators, who will in turn have to train the participants. "The temptation in the short form will be to get people to serve up their lives very quickly: `What was your happiest moment' "

"In truth, there's always another side," she said. "The lost dreams."

Both the product of oral history and the process of collecting it differ from journalism. Oral history describes the past, even the very recent past, while journalism describes the present. For example, this newspaper article describes the current status of Mr. Isay's project. Were it a work of oral history, this article would focus on David Isay's describing how it felt to be him and to have an office in downtown Manhattan in the early years of the new century, when he was planning a big project.

To complete the analogy to Mr. Isay's project, imagine that every day, a different person wrote the story that appeared in this space and that tomorrow it might be you.

The purpose of oral history, said Studs Terkel, the 90-year-old historian and radio interviewer who began his career with the W.P.A., is to tell the story of the world through the voices of the salt of the earth.

"Sir Francis Drake conquered the Spanish Armada," Mr. Terkel said in an interview. "I thought he did it by himself. Those who shed those other tears are what history should be about. Who built the pyramids Mrs. Pharaoh's fingernails were as manicured as Elizabeth Taylor's. Thousands of people built them. What are their stories"

Mr. Terkel said that the participants themselves are the first beneficiaries of oral history. By way of example, he said that he once interviewed a woman in a housing project who had never heard her voice on tape. When he played back the tape, the woman said, "I never knew I felt that way."

It is this part of Mr. Isay's fund-raising pitch — the assertion that oral history works as therapy to the participants — that draws more skepticism from experts in the field.

"We don't know really what impact this sort of recitation of life history has on individuals," said John Bodnar, a co-director of the Center for the Study of History and Memory at Indiana University.

Oral history has gone in and out of fashion since tape recorders were invented. The recent development of inexpensive duplicable compact disks and computerized recording equipment has made possible Mr. Isay's effort to democratize the interviewing in addition to the storytelling. A similar current project is the effort by the Library of Congress to collect interviews of all war veterans conducted by family members.

Professor Bodnar also questioned if participants would be forthcoming and complete. It is lies of omission, he said, that could taint the results.

"Can you imagine how many people would go out there and tell a family member with a facilitator nearby about an instance of child abuse" he said. "You're going to get the public face of these individuals more than you're going to get authentic stories."

To avoid that result, Mr. Isay plans to use the recording of his great-uncle, Mr. Birnbaum, as an example and as a training tool. As that oral document rolls along toward the 75-minute mark, where it ends, the quiver and warble in the voice grows, and pauses elongate. The voice begins to describe another side of a comfortable life, a side that has emerged since the death of the speaker's wife, Birdie Birnbaum.

"Grief is a funny thing, you know," Mr. Birnbaum says. "Right now, when I do break down, I hate to say this, but it's a good feeling. 'Cause, you know, it's like, you're — God, I never thought of this before — it's like you're trying to defend yourself, and all of a sudden you don't have to anymore.

"You're going to cry — you know what I mean — and nothing's, uh, you don't have to pretend that you're being a brave soul, gutting it through. You're just letting go, and it's a good feeling. It's hard to say, you break out crying or you choke up and you can't say a word and it's a good feeling. Yeah. You know, you no longer have to defend yourself, or act something you don't really feel, that you're happy with everything, 'cause you're not, 'cause you never will be.

"Until I get rid of that extra bed in my room. I still once in a while reach over. I don't know what to do with it.

"Oh well. That brings us up to date. That's where I am now."

On the tape, Mr. Isay asks Mr. Birnbaum whether he thought that talking about this grief might be damaging.

"Oh, no," Mr. Birnbaum says. "I'll be just back to where I was when I walked in here in about 10, 5 minutes."

Posted by glenn at May 9, 2003 10:22 AM | TrackBack