Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families [Re]-connect in Cyberspace

Abstract

How we remember and give meaning to the past are creative processes; we take fragments and try to knit them together into something approaching a logical flow. In personal terms, memory is always a reconstruction from the myriad moments of experience, forced by psychological dynamics into some form of narrative. History as a social process tries to stand back from the personal, to make sense of it against a broader fabric. It may include the personal stories of participants, but it will always be set in the political and social time in which it is articulated. History is therefore both a social science, in terms of methodological approaches, and a humanities discipline, in terms of its synthesis of emotional, aesthetic and intellectual responses.