Mathes to be WAMU’s new general

Ann Ferren Teaching Conference garners record attendance

Judicial forum energizes new generation of leaders

AU works to improve D.C. schools through $6.4 million grant

AU graduate organizes tsunami relief effort

SOC unveils investigative journalism fellowship

Time to paint

Poet probes science of tragic memories

by Matt Getty

If you could map the pathways of curiosity, you’d need an artist’s hand to trace the rich and complex course that has brought literature professor and poet Myra Sklarew to her current work on a book tentatively titled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory. On the surface, this study linking the fractured memories of Holocaust survivors with recent findings in neuroscience looks like an abrupt departure for Sklarew, a sudden twist in the road of poetry and teaching. Yet, the path linking this woman of letters to the science of the mind actually loops back to her childhood, winds through many of her adult years, and offers solid evidence that, as Sklarew sees it, knowledge can never be wasted.

An acclaimed author of six collections of poetry, Sklarew began her writing life simply. As an eight-year-old girl surrounded by U.S. home front concerns during World War II, she first wrote creatively just to keep a beloved teacher from crying. “During the war I had a teacher who used to cry a lot—she had brothers overseas—and I found that by writing stories I could enchant her,” Sklarew recalls. “That was important to me, I think—to find that even in those rigid times there was a value in writing.”

At the same time, however, Sklarew was also fascinated by science. The daughter of a biochemist, she still beams when she recalls her father’s ability to answer all of her childhood questions. “It wasn’t just that he had an answer for everything,” she explains. “It was more that he believed that there was a way to find the answer. I would ask a question, and he would say ‘well, let’s take a look at this,’ and I just loved that.”

While she continued to informally nurture her creative writing talents, Sklarew’s formal education followed a scientific path. She majored in biology at Tufts University and studied bacterial genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory in New York. Later, she worked at Yale Medical School, studying frontal lobe function and memory in Rhesus monkeys before embarking on the literary career for which she is now best known.

In 1993, however, decades after leaving the lab, Sklarew roused her dormant scientific interests to tackle a mystery with both personal and historical significance. Having known since childhood that most of her mother’s family in Lithuania had been massacred during the Holocaust, she made an eye-opening visit to the Baltic country once it won independence from the U.S.S.R. “Even though I’d known about it all my life,” explains Sklarew, who had also long written about the Holocaust in poetry and essays. “I simply didn’t understand it the way you do if you’ve walked in the place where people died.”

Encountering firsthand the massacre’s burial pits, that same sensitivity that led her to write stories for a depressed teacher and that eagerness to, as her father put it, “take a look,” drove Sklarew to reach out to surviving villagers who’d lived with memories of the tragedy for 50 years. “I just felt it was important to try to remember what had happened there,” she explains. “You have to understand, this was very early on, and I’ve always felt—I don’t know if this is true or not—that this was sort of a testing ground, that maybe if this hadn’t happened . . . Who knows?”

In her quest to better understand what had happened, however, Sklarew hit a roadblock. Among the Lithuanians she interviewed, memories of identical events varied drastically. “Rescuers, survivors, children who’d grown up since . . . They all remembered things differently,” she recalls. “And it wasn’t just in their accounts, but also in the way they remembered, the way the trauma shaped their memory. Some people would remember something visually with no emotional connection. Others would have an emotional memory with nothing attached to it—no visual accompaniment, no sound, nothing.”

To help unravel this mystery and shed new light not only on a pivotal moment in history, but also on the way the mind works, Sklarew began and continues to integrate what she’d learned from numerous Holocaust survivors with neuroscientists’ new understanding of memory as fluid and psychologically impacted. What she’s finding is that experience shapes not only our memories, but also the way we form those memories. “It’s as if there’s some mechanism by which the brain bypasses the cognitive functions during these [traumatic] experiences and goes right to the motor response as a sort of survival mechanism,” she explains.

As she makes these discoveries, Sklarew is also finding a new use for the science studies she’d seemingly abandoned nearly three decades ago, completing an intellectual journey that suggests you can come full circle and still cover new ground. “The work brings together lifelong interests that I never could have imagined using together, and though it’s about a terrible subject, something about that feels right,” she explains. “I’ve always said to anyone willing to listen that whatever we learn in our lives is never wasted. If we just pay attention to what we’re drawn to and allow ourselves to truly be there in the moment, it will always come to use some day.”