Telling memories

Curious conversations: what the oral histories of Russian Jewish émigrés reveal about memory. Songs, books, movies, plays, podcasts... why do we endlessly seek out new stories? This week we're curating articles that explore this cultural and social phenomenon to try and understand it. Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union tell inconsistent stories. Helen Haft writing in Aeon Magazine tries to find out what explains these discrepancies. At what point do our memories, morphed by time and ourselves, replace our initial interpretation of events? Can our initial perceptions ever be objective? And what does this say about the nature of memory?