This course, “Translating Oral History: A Story of Fascism, Colonialism, WW II, and Identity,” is centered around an interview that is part of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Thanks to the Language Resource Center, we have gained access to this interview. During Winter semester 2021, students in Italian 232 transcribed the interview. In this class, we will work from their transcription and produce a translation from Italian into English so that the English-speaking world can learn more about history. As such, this offers students a unique opportunity to work in groups and learn experientially. Additionally, we will contribute to and advance the important work that is being done at Yale to make the stories of men and women who lived during the Holocaust heard. We will be using a video of an interview done at Yale in 1987 of Maria Gilda, a woman who grew up in an Italian community in Tunisia and lived there from the 1920s to the 1960s. After moving away, she became a French citizen and lived the rest of her life in France. This is a 45-minute video in which she tells the story of her life. Through her story, we see a different narrative of war and we can dissect and discuss Maria Gilda’s complex identity as an Italian-Jewish woman who was born in Tunisia and became French. This video will make up the central piece of content in the course in addition to other readings so that we can better understand Maria Gilda’s place and time in history. We will do brief readings/viewings on Fascism, World War II, colonialism, and oral history. Through Maria Gilda’s story, we will flesh out the big stakes of history from her point of view. This aspect of history (compared to History with a capital H) will also be the way in which we will enrich our knowledge of the Italian language. In addition to the content provided by the video and brief excerpts of readings, our focus on grammar will come from the textbook, Immagina. In Maria Gilda’s interview, there is a plethora of grammatical structures at work and in each chapter, we will be on the hunt for those structures in the interview and we will use them to describe what we are learning from and about Maria Gilda’s life. The objectives of this course will mirror those of a typical Italian 232 in terms of the advancement of the four skills—reading, writing, speaking and listening. Furthermore, we will dedicate class time to reflectivity, and conversations about culture and history.

Class Format:

For Fall 2021: This class will meet in-person Mondays & Thursdays, and remotely on Tuesdays & Fridays. Remote class meetings will be held synchronously with the times listed for the class. Students are expected to be available during all scheduled class times.