“Carro, Cane, Pantaloni” : Introducing Lore Shelley

Holocaust survivor and scholar, Dr Lore Shelley, was a modest philomath. Despite having authored five books on the Holocaust, she eluded attention as a scholarly subject. To date, there exists only one autobiographical narrative from Shelley, as featured in her first book, Secretaries of Death. Even photos of Shelley, absent from book sleeves and sparsely present elsewhere, resist locating. This brief biography endeavors to remedy this unfamiliarity.While the Lore Shelley Papers at the Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco serve as the originating point of this biography, this history draws on a wealth of primary and secondary resources, including collaboration with daughter, Dr. Gabriela Shelley. Centrally, this life history contextualizes Shelley’s academic contributions not only within Holocaust historiography, but in the larger trajectory of her life as an activist, scholar, and mother.In line with practicing the radical empathy as proposed by archivists Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (“From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives”), this biography is written from a feminist ethics of care, centering Shelley’s family as the central focal point and implicated community; crafted from, with, and for her legacy.