How to Bear Witness in Writing, with Author Rachael Cerrotti

TO DESCRIBE RACHAEL CERROTTI as a multi-platform writer, producer, author, teacher does not quite accurately encompass all the ways in which she covers deeply important topics and communicates to the world. She is an award-winning author, photographer, educator, and audio producer. And she is currently the inaugural Storyteller in Residence for the USC Shoah Foundation where she produces and co-hosts The Memory Generation Podcast. Her critically-acclaimed debut memoir titled, We Share The Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory & Migration was just released. It’s our great, good fortune to have her here to talk about how to bear witness in writing. Listen in and read along. 

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Marion: Welcome, Rachael.

Rachael: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Marion: I’m delighted that you’re here and it’s just going to be so fun to talk with you. Your work is remarkable and has this broad platform on it, or underneath it I guess is the way we think. So I just want to lead off by talking about, you’re fairly young. And in a fairly young life, you seem already to have been cast in the role to bear witness to a great many large life experiences. Many people have, of course, but few have turned these experiences into a multi-platform career that includes photo journalism, writing, podcasting and teaching. So let’s go back a bit and see if we can recreate the creation of this eye of yours, as well as describe how you choose to relate what you see. So I’m thinking of the fact that in 2009, you were in college studying photo journalism. So what was the appeal of the camera for you at that age?

Rachael: Sure. Well, I’ll say that I actually wasn’t studying photo journalism, I was studying communications because my goal was to get out of college as quickly as possible. And any journalism track had a hierarchy and communications didn’t. So that was my avenue, but I was already actively working and dedicated to being a photo journalist during college. I kept trying to skip steps. But I actually got into photography when I was in high school. I grew up in the Boston Public Schools systems, which did not have a great arts program or many opportunities.

And then just before high school, my parents moved me and my brother literally less than a mile away into a suburb called Brookline. And there, I started high school there and there was every type of art possibility and option. And I ended up just kind of by accident choosing a darkroom photography course. It sounded interesting. And that was the direction I began on. So even in high school, I did an independent tracking photography and somehow managed to get my schedule to be that I wouldn’t go to school till like three hours late because between the newspaper and the darkroom, I had all these like independent projects going that fulfilled class credits and that’s kind of been replicated in my professional life, so to speak. So getting into college, that just continued to grow for me.

Marion: So I was looking at the timeline of your many awards and I see that you had a solo show in Boston when you were in your early twenties. And I started to continue to wonder about that camera and your storytelling. And in previous interviews with writers, as well as in my own writing, I’ve explored the role of the notebook, that sort of singular object we hold in our hand as a reporter, it can be a shield, it can be an entry pass, it can be a confidant, it can be a lot of things. But I wonder about that role of the lens in terms of putting it between you and the world. Does it separate you or does it bring you closer?

Rachael: I think it does both at the same time and that’s the magic of the camera. And one of the things that I love about it is that simultaneously, it protected me from many very difficult emotions or things that would normally scare me. It gave me this sense of protection, but at the same time, it was the way that I was able to walk into so many communities and homes and people’s lives. The camera was such a tool of communication.

And so much of my work started and continued in other countries where I didn’t speak the language, maybe I had a few words, but it was not a language that I could grow a relationship in, but with the camera, I could. So when I was living in someone’s home and trying to photograph their life and learn about who they were, the way I would communicate with the kids was by taking portraits and showing them the back of the camera and learning the words for like one more, to like have a game about it. And so it just became this really valuable tool for me as like a purpose. It gave me a purpose and no matter where I was, I had a reason to be there. And I think that was really good for me emotionally and totally fueled my curiosity.

Marion: I wondered about that. It’s a portal on some level and you go so many places and it’s there with you, throughout this book, we witness it many, many times and we witnessed this whole idea of recording and looking really dramatically early in your story when you ask your grandmother, Hana, if you can record her tale, she’s a Holocaust survivor and the only one in her family alive at the end of the war.

And when she dies in 2010, you discovered this archive of her materials, photographs, letters, journals, diaries, deportation and immigration papers, childhood report cards. And much of this material had to be translated, meaning it was not immediately available to you. So there’s lots of obstacles to this, but you say in this beautiful book that you become obsessed with this material. So let’s talk about that, that eye that leads us to become obsessed. Writers have to believe in their stories, but obsessed? How did you keep lit and stoke the fire of that obsession?

Rachael: It’s a great question that I have to ask myself sometimes because the book and the podcast were really the culmination of really a decade of work. Now I’m continuing on with that work, it just looks very different now, but really this kind of decade of exploration and spent a lot of years as a nomadic journalist and a very excited photographer running around with this big backpack that has now caused my back problems, I’m realizing. But I’m like, why am I young with back problems? It’s like, oh, because you carried a 50 pound bag around with you and Converse Chucks for most of your twenties, that’s why.

But my grandmother’s story just took me in, in the sense that I just kept wanting to know more. And that was for part of it was that with every new thing I learned, I had a new character come in and I wanted to know about their life. So with like every layer that got peeled back, another one got put over. So I’m trying to figure out that space and just let it go. And also nobody was funding this work for so many years that I had this permission to keep going with it. Nobody was asking me to be done with it. Nobody was waiting for me to submit a manuscript or to have a podcast done, none of that. So really it became this lifestyle.

And as that progressed over the years and my own life unfolded, which is told in the work that I do as well, my grandmother’s story started to take a very different role in my life. So I’d say for like half of that decade, it was very much me going into her world to better understand history, to start figuring out how to be a documentary storyteller, right. This was my first big project, so I was in a big exploration phase of what is my voice.

And then in the second half of this decade, I really had to bring her story into my world to help get through a lot of personal challenges. And so this became really interesting to me of like how stories change over time and I got really fascinated by memory and started looking at my grandmother’s diaries differently. So the first time I read them, I was in my early twenties and starting to try to make sense of all this history and really come to terms with what does it even mean to go through the Holocaust and big historical questions.

And then later on, as time goes forward, I’m rereading these pieces of writings and noticing things I didn’t notice the first time around because I’m a different person. So things struck me differently. And this relationship that we have with the past is something that has continued to keep me so entrenched in this type of work. I love that stories keep changing and I find it to be a very beautiful piece of us.

Marion: It’s a wonderful thing. And the story changes as you said for you, as you grew and along the way, and I’m not sure where exactly you see your story and that of your grandmother’s connected in ways. And tell us please about that dawning. I doubt it was one particular moment, maybe it was, but that realization that there are similarities that you’re helping each other along in some way, writers have these moments of dawning, we live for them, but sometimes we have to keep them to ourselves until we have proof.

If you try to pitch this to your parents or a loved one, they’re kind of, these ideas are kind of met with, if you’re lucky, just indulgence sort of withering stares, they’re usually met by a no from an agent. But as you said before, you were liberated from that. Because there was no one waiting and sometimes you get a mere tolerant nod from someone who loves you. So let’s talk about that dawning, if you would, at that reassurance for you that your tales were intertwined, how did you feed that?

Rachael: Well, I think it was one of the first questions I went into this work with, which is everyone says that this history matters to me and I know it does, right. You’re like you know in your bones when something impacts you and matters to you, but I think sometimes it’s less clear of how. How does it impact me? In what way is this changing my own relationship with the world? My identity, my responsibility, that’s a big one. And so I think I went in with that question to start with, and I think it was a very clear for me because this was my grandmother. So this is my family history. And so we’re talking about my great-grandparents and all these other people and I’m in Europe and meeting individuals who, perhaps very distantly and maybe not through a biological connection, I have a relationship with, even if I don’t know them.

And so that was obvious. It wasn’t until I started to get older, have deep human experiences that were both beautiful and hard and sometimes beautifully hard that her story started to have a really different impact in the sense that I was really leaning on her words. My grandmother was a really gifted writer. I always say that had she grown up in a different time and place, she would’ve been able to do the work that I do beautifully. And her words became like my teacher, they became my writing teacher in many ways. Her words became my therapy. They became my justifications, they became my questions.

And so I was living against this backdrop of this beautifully explored life that my grandmother had given as a gift to the next generation. We’re not talking one or two diaries here, we’re talking about her telling one story in real time when she’s 14 and then me having another diary of hers 50 years later, where she reflects back on that experience. And that type of patience to understand a story as it unfolds over one’s life, is incredible insight, and really becomes this very useful thing to have in life. I say thing, because it depends how you package it, of perspective where you’re like, oh, I’m going through something really, really difficult right now, or really, really wonderful, in the future I know this will not be here, this too shall pass, the good and the bad and being able to have that perspective of like, oh my grandmother went through the unimaginable, I can get through this.

Everything just started infiltrating into my life. And I set out to go travel and do all this work when I was the same age that she was when she came to America after 11 years of being a stateless refugee and the only survivor. So just even the age piece of it really felt like she was having a lot of human experiences that were not necessarily war related, that were just human related. And I was having a lot of human experiences and it was just really nice conversation. And it sounds weird to say this, but like all throughout my twenties, I got to have this intimate conversation with my grandmother who had already passed away. And so that was really cool to me. It was really, really cool to me.

Marion: And it works in a book form, it works in a podcast form and it’s fascinating to think about how this information started to inform you. And I’m going to flip the question around now out because along the way, to turning this material into what would eventually become the first podcast, the first ever narrative podcast based on a Holocaust survivor’s testimony, you were living your life, as you said, and I spoke of the range of things to which you have born witnessed, but you were widowed at 27, just one month after your wedding celebration.

I would say 11 months after we were married, one month after the celebration.

Marion: And on your website, you let us into this storyline in an ongoing series of photographs that tells a story of women under 40 who have lost their partners. And so you’ve told us how your grandmother helped carry you through the bad and the good, and I wonder, how did the experience of loss and the documentation of tragic change inform you in your role of baring witness to her story?

Rachael: Well, I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through that loss, which was very sudden, my husband, Sergiusz, passed away from a heart attack when he was 28. So it was like a statistical anomaly and he was Polish and came from Europe. And so there was, he had offered me this whole wonderful connection to my grandmother as well, which was unintentional. But by giving me a home and a family in Europe, I suddenly had this other connection to the place where my family had to flee from. Having already done so many years of work with my grandmother’s story at that point, because remember, I started this when I was 20 and I was widowed when I was 27.

So I had seven years to confront of asking myself like, how could I have told my grandmother’s story for all these years, not knowing the feeling of grief? And I remember thinking that when I was sitting in the hospital and I write that in the book, because it was a very stark feeling for me where I say like, I felt like a fraud. What even right did I have? I mean, it was shaking everything for me of what right do we have to tell anybody’s story? How do we think that we can understand? And then that really leaned itself into this thing that I’m still exploring, which is, what language do we have to use when we tell other people’s stories?

Because we all, we will, this is how… The beautiful thing about humanity is that we pass down stories and intergenerational storytelling. And it’s wonderful. And it’s like the greatest gift I think that can be given from one generation to the next, what is the appropriate language to use when you retell someone else’s memories while having total recognition and respect for the fact that you’ll never actually know how they felt? And that was a big turning point for me.

Marion: There you go.

Rachael: And so when I went out and started doing the widowhood series, it was actually really incredible because I was simultaneously still doing this story about my grandmother, like working on this and this story takes me all across America. And so I was traveling across America and at the same time photographing all these women and all of this experience, and I like to say the wisdom I’ve received from survivors, which is, I’ve been very lucky to know a number of them, started to really have an impact in the way that I was talking to these other young women who had lost their person, not having anything to do with the Holocaust, it had everything to do with like how do you move forward and grief and strength.

And all of these questions. And so, you start to see these connections where you’re like, oh, there is nothing about war. That’s not it. We’re talking about a very different human emotion that connects us now between like this past and this present.

Marion: That’s a beautiful answer and so helpful because life goes on. What does John Lennon teach us, “life is what happens while you busy making other plans,” and you don’t get to separate them, they nest inside one another and you might as well let them inform you because they’re trying to.

Rachael: And it’s beautiful and it’s rich. And I think that that’s one of the great gifts that I get is like, just because you go through something tragic or traumatic, painful, completely that changes you, that changes your perspective, doesn’t mean that moving forward you don’t get joy and happiness and pleasure. But I think one of the themes that came up a lot between those two communities of people, that’s, still when I work with both these communities of people is the guilt that’s felt about being happy again after something was really terrible and constantly trying to navigate this space of like, I want to stay joyful. And how do I do that? My grandmother was a great teacher for that as well.

Marion: Your grandmother is quite the character and I’m going to let people buy the book and read about her green hair at one point.

Rachael: For my bat mitzvah.

Marion: For your bat mitzvah, she comes in green hair. Her grandmother comes to her bat mitzvah in green hair. Let me just say that right now, and if you don’t go buy the book, right this second online for that one detail, well… Let me tell you also, she learns to swear like a stevedore in foreign languages and it’s just really wonderful.

But these themes that you’re writing about, these are the biggest of themes, the Holocaust, your grandmother’s extraordinary tale of survival, the death of a young marriage, the death of this for young man, any of which could have gotten mired in mere reverence, which of course we can have, but which of course can prevent really good reporting, fair assessment and a critical eye for how to curate through one’s life. Reverence is a, whoo!, it’s a pothole. So guided by reverence, I think we put in everything, we don’t curate, we load the reader up or the listener up with too much, and we lose our perspective as storytellers. How did you avoid it?

Rachael: I think that, originally I think it goes back to what I wanted to do originally in life, which was be a photojournalist because, I wouldn’t use the word journalist to describe myself now, but I was trained and attracted to that set of like ethics and documentary storytelling, where I really wanted to be honest and tell a true story, but I also really wanted like a rich, deep, nuanced, layered, complicated story.

I love stories where you have two truths that contradict each other. I just find it to be the most honest replication of life. And I didn’t start off this story thinking I was going to tell my own story. I had no plans to be a character in this. And when I started to think about myself as a character in this, I was thinking through the lens of like, I’m going to publish a travel book. I mean, this is before I’m married and before I’m widowed or anything, before the refugee crisis happens, this is before 2016. Like the world was very different and I was young and I was like, oh, I’ll try be a travel log. And so I was like, oh, be first person narrative.

But it wasn’t going to have this, at that point, the project didn’t have the depth it has now. And then I think moving for forward when I started to realize what this was going to be, and when I say that in regards to like the, We Share The Same Sky podcast and book, it was this question of how do I use myself and my story as a connection to the past? Because I did enough teaching at that point of young people too, that I had a good understanding of what stories engaged people in conversation. And that played a lot into my decision making as a writer.

And I was very, very, very, very careful of like, I really don’t want to be navel-gazing. And I think I was more hyper nervous about that than anything else where this is not a story about me. I will be honest and vulnerable and let you know what I experienced and what I felt and who I met in a purpose of the story. And the story could have been written in a lot of different ways, but in the way that I chose to tell it, but any fact about myself, any experience that I was center staged with, I had to have a reason for it to be in there.

So I think that that was part of being able to decipher, because that same type of objectivity had to be used for the way I talked about my grandmother, for the way I talked about my late husband, for the way I talked about many of these. I mean, most of the people in this book have passed away and I very much value these people. Like they are so on such a pedestal in my life. And it’s really strange to publish a memoir in your early thirties and have most of the people in the book no longer here. And that’s just in the past few years, a lot of people passed away. I don’t know if that answers the question.

Marion: No, it does. You avoided the reverence trap. The reverence trap is huge, especially if everybody’s dead, it’s huge and that’s all there is to it. And you do. I read very carefully through the lines, just wondering how you were going to avoid it. And when I say I read through, I read through this beautiful book, We Share The Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory & Migration and we’ll put lots of links to it in the transcript. And it’s a wonder of reporting, writing and editing and not falling into the reverence trap.

And we touched on this a little bit at the very beginning of the interview, but I want to dive a little more deeply into it. You make this great statement, this great bold statement at the opener of your book. You declare that the story you are driven to tell is ever changing. And I hear this from memoir writers all the time that looking in the rear view mirror, the scene changes daily. So give the writers listening to this, some advice on managing this reality.

Rachael: Well, let’s see. I think becoming peaceful with this place of understanding that the way you’re writing the story is the way that you’re writing it right now. And just like you are building a lens into someone else’s experience or a period of history, you’re also building the space for yourself as the writer in this moment and kind of being excited by the fact that if you were to write this 10 years from now, you would see it differently.

I think that once you get over the hump of, is this the best way to tell this story? Because there’s many best ways to tell this story, right? I would say like, this is a story of a person in a period of history. If any of my cousins decided to take this on and write their own version, whatever that were to look like, they would have totally different memories of my grandmother. Right.

And so I think just like really appreciating that this is kind of a little time capsule of how this feels right now. And one example I can give is that, I mean, I don’t have children and I definitely don’t have grandchildren. And I know that if I get to play those roles in my life, I’m going to turn to my grandmother’s story and completely have a revelation of like, I don’t want to say revelation, but let’s say an overflow of emotion of what it would be like to send my child away. That’s just, I can’t. My great grandparents sent my grandmother away when she was 14 years old in 1939. And her younger brother couldn’t go because he was too young.

And I build out this whole vibrant scene, both in the podcast and the book of them at the train station and saying goodbye. And I use a lot of words of like, I imagine it would look like this because I don’t know what exactly look like. So what I write is how I would imagine it being, and that’s a way to be able to visualize a history I don’t have factual reporting on. And I know that like when cousins of mine read that piece of the book who have kids, they told me it was like, it was so gut wrenchingly painful for them to think about.

But like, I just know that’s not emotion I can access. And I learned that when my husband died was that there are just certain doors of emotions I can’t walk through right now, and that’s totally okay. It doesn’t make me bad at my job, it just means that I got spaces I can see and spaces I can’t. And that’s where I’m at right now.

Marion: Great answer. I love that. I interview a lot of memoir writers and I tend to ask them all this one question, so let me ask you, what are we doing when we ask a memoir writer to go back into a trauma? Are we asking them to reanimate it, relive it, re-inhabit it, look at it with great distance and perspective? What do you think this process requires?

Rachael: Well, I almost want to answer this, not as the perspective of being a memoir writer, but from the perspective of the work that I do with USC Shoah Foundation which, just very briefly, is an institute based in Los Angeles. It’s the institute that Spielberg started after he made Schindler’s List. And he and a wonderful team of humans went out and documented, took oral histories, testimony from over 50,000 Holocaust survivors. My grandmother being one of them. That’s how you hear her in the podcast, is from that tape that was recorded in 1998.

So I work with USC Shoah Foundation as their Storyteller in Residence. And I’ve worked with them in some capacity for a number of years. And what I get to do on my day to day is I work with their, now their archive is over 55,000 testimonies of not just Holocaust survivors, but people who survived or witness what happened in Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rohingya, people who’ve gone through horrible atrocities.

And so what I do day in and day out is listen to these stories and these are oral histories. And so what it is we interview these people because they went through trauma and you learn like what is the appropriate way to ask someone to share? And then why? Why do we want these stories? And then learning how to give somebody the space to feel what they’re going to feel and not challenge the way they feel. And I think that… And I know that that goes to right too, there’s lots of people I interviewed who’ve gone through very difficult things that are not part of that I’m in, other refugees and all these widows and everybody.

And I think that more often than not, people really want to be heard and they want to be seen and they want to feel like what they experienced meant something. And when you ask somebody, why do they want to tell their story? I think it’s such an important question because understanding their reasoning for why they feel the desire to share, retell, replay gives us a lot of insight in like what to do with that story. And I think it’s a respect question of like, how do you want your story told? How do you want your story remembered? And then giving them the space to just talk, to make them feel validated.

And I know that when my grandmother was dying, one of the things that I remember very vividly, and I was a college kid at this time, her just constantly asking the question of why did I survive? And it was a very haunting question and I’ve always felt like that that has always been like a big part of why I’ve done this work, kind of subconsciously, but also consciously, sometimes depending on the day. Is like, I want to answer that question because it matters now. Because like what you experienced helps me and I’m not saying that’s why, but I can at least help give some purpose, even if she isn’t here to witness that.

Marion: Lovely. I’m so glad you mentioned the Shoah Foundation, their mission is to develop empathy, understanding and respect through testimony. And in your role as the inaugural Storyteller in Residence and in podcast, The Memory Generation, you and your co-host, the oral historian, Stephen D. Smith dig into these testimonies, as you say. And it’s a remarkable responsibility and it gives you enormous access into what I think is one of life’s great questions. And as we wrap this up, I have to ask you this, what becomes of those of us who survive something?

Rachael: Well, hopefully we get to go on and have really enjoyable lives or at least a compilation of really enjoyable experiences along this journey called life. I think that’s person to person. I do a lot of work with communities that are children and grandchildren of survivors. Because I’m very interested in intergenerational storytelling and I love learning about how stories are passed from one generation to the next. And I love learning how culture comes into play.

Jewish community has a very strong emphasis on that. It’s a value, it’s called L’dor V’dor, “from generation to generation.” Other communities that’s not necessarily the case, right. And so that changes the relationship. But I think that the answer gets to change over time, right? Like there’s different periods of time where our story has a different purpose. And sometimes we put our stories or our traumas, our pains, our lived experiences, sometimes we have them in a box inside of us and put it a little far away and then we pull it out when we need it. And sometimes that box is always open.

And I think that’s one of the things that I’m learning and becoming content with, within my own widowhood and within my own grief is that some days I don’t feel super connected to the identity of being widow, and sometimes it’s the only thing that I can think about. And I’ve kind of come to respect that. I think I used to fear it and I’ve come to respect that everybody goes through something and depending who’s around us and the support we feel and how busy we are and how distracted we are and what conversations, our energy levels, how well we slept, it plays a different role and you know what, that changes the story. So it changes the story.

Marion: There we go. That’s so generous. I so appreciate that answer. And I’m so grateful for you for coming along. Thank you, Rachael.

Rachael: Thank you.

Marion: I’m really honored to have you here. You’re so welcome and go sell a bazillion copies of this book, please.

Rachael: I will try. I will try. It’s my first go with publishing a book, so I’m learning the business as I go forth into it.

Marion: Well, that was Rachael Cerrotti. See more on her at rachael cerrotti dot com. Her new book is We Share The Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory & Migration available wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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