Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on... more Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on victims' families, and the significant role of "memory work" by survivors' children within the broader frame of cultural memory in the English-speaking countries of post-war Jewish diasporas. It studies how these authors explore the past in their literary texts – primarily life writing. By identifying key areas where memory manifests and can be traced – family objects, given names, bodies, food, the memorial uses of the Passover Seder, and the attacks of 9/11 – it shows how the Second Generation engages with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival. Departing from prevailing trauma studies approaches, Nina Fischer builds an argument for the positive achievements of memory work by Second Generation writers in reconnecting with their family's pre-Holocaust life, a "usable past", in spite of horrific loss.
Nina Fischer analyzes the memory work of children of Holocaust survivors as presented in publishe... more Nina Fischer analyzes the memory work of children of Holocaust survivors as presented in published life writings and fictional texts. She identifies a number of specific features in the writing of the Second Generation, and she traces those in thematically organized chapters. The great value of her book is that it goes beyond a descriptive listing of themes and leitmotifs and, instead, demonstrates how the children of survivors interact with their parents' experiences and stories over time. As opposed to a videotaped or otherwise archived testimony of a survivor, the literary texts of children of survivors are not merely receptacles for their parents' stories but a medium through which they work with, remediate and re-purpose the past. Actively making sense of, and bringing perspective to, their experiences of having grown up in the intimate settings of a survivor family, the Second Generation engages in what Fischer aptly calls " memory work, " which she defines as an " individual's conscious voluntary, and methodical interrogation of the past within collective frameworks " (2). She focuses on familial settings, because it is there that most of the memory work of the Second Generation takes place. Those who witness survivor testimony occasionally can safely return to a world untainted by calamity. Children of survivors do not have this option. Traumatic memories in their families are present in the intimate rhythms of everyday life, accentuated at special occasions (like yahrzeit or holy days), symbolically condensed in names and objects, and sometimes they erupted in the form of eccentric behavior. Coming to terms with their parents' past through writing is, according to Fischer, a relational task. It is an attempt at making sense of childhood experiences and, at the same time, at gaining adult perspectives on their parents—through the venues of family biography, historical knowledge, psychological interpretation, preservation of their parents' voice (from interviews to retrieved letters), physical visits to the lost homes in Europe, and descriptions of their families post-1945 migrant status. Fischer suggests that the terms " trans-generational life-writing " (Victoria Stewart) or " relational life writing " (John Eakin) well describe the literary oeuvre produced by the Second Generation. The goal of such relational memory work is to turn their parents' experiences into a " usable past "
Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and ... more Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and Germany' of Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical an... more Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical analogy and cultural shorthand, it functions as a powerful Palestinian weapon when used to describe Israeli policy and actions in what amounts to a battle of narratives in the international arena. For a long time, Palestinians have been known primarily for their violent struggle, but employing loaded vocabulary to depict their lives and experiences under Israeli control is more than just using a certain word, it is a strategic choice. The earliest uses of the apartheid analogy have long been placed in the 1970s, however, evidence of its use can already be found before the United Nation’s General Assembly declared apartheid a crime in 1973. The first instances happened simultaneously with the development of the organized Palestinian national movement in the 1960s. Focusing on Fayez Sayegh (1922–1980), an academic and UN special rapporteur to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, I argue such historical analogies need to be read as a nonviolent tactic of resistance within the Palestinian struggle. Sayegh was almost singlehandedly responsible for introducing the apartheid analogy at the United Nations – my primary contextual interest. His analyses of racial segregation, however, were thoroughly countered, making his engagement for Palestine seem like a failure. And yet his early attempts to bring the apartheid analogy into wide circulation, along with the increasingly more complicated situation on the ground, show results. Today, the term has become common usage in describing Israel and puts enormous pressure on the country. The spread of the apartheid analogy shows that non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance, which in the 1960s and 1970s were almost invisible internationally, long existed.
Sartre, Jews and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race, and Gender edited by Manuela Consonni and Vivian Liska. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. (Vidal Sassoon Series in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice 1). , 2020
Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, o... more Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, often taking the form of competitive victimhood, as supporters of both sides politicize the memory of the genocide for their political gain. In her 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian-American Susan Abulhawa interweaves a Palestinian narrative of history-including the Nakba, that is, the destruction of historical Palestine in 1948, the ongoing conflict and the Israeli occupation-with Holocaust memory. By acknowledging rather than minimizing or denying the Israelis' cultural trauma, she takes a stance of empathy, which researchers consider a prerequisite for peaceful conflict transformation. I contend that Mornings in Jenin exemplifies how cultural texts not only provide a space to explore how new mnemonic links are being drawn up against contested and reified national narratives in Israel/Palestine but also play a political role by performing a narrative that acknowledges the cultural trauma of the other side.
Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others edited by Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev., 2019
In Spatialising Peace and Conflict: Mapping the Production of Place, Sites and Scales of Violence, edited by Annika Björkdahl and Susanne Buckley-Zistel. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan., 2016
Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, ... more Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.
As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is o... more As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is one of the most culturally significant and often-imagined landscapes in the world. Today, this landscape is the setting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has witnessed violence throughout history, but, with the erection of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, conflict is now physically inscribed into the land. The barrier has received global attention, not only in the media, but also in a range of cultural products, including (illustrated) books, graphic novels, and films. However, scholarship has yet to address explorations of the structure, which has a marked visual and visceral effect, in aesthetic media. This article uses methodologies developed by memory studies to analyse a number of such cultural interrogations of the barrier, including Christmas Card, a viral image ascribed to the street artist Banksy, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape by Raja Shehadeh, and the Simone Bitton’s documentary film Mur/Wall. I argue that all these works reference cultural memories related to the Holy Land and evoke the loss of the biblical landscape. In such invocations, the current conflict is grafted onto cultural memory in order to mediate it for geographically disparate audiences and to create awareness of the contemporary situation in this all but holy land.
Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling t... more Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures.
Migrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust ... more Migrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the locations of family and community in Europe have been destroyed culturally and physically and have become ‘lost places’. Lives of Holocaust survivors are rarely thought about from the perspective of migrant biographies, even though only very few survivors returned to live in their former hometowns after liberation, but instead moved to countries around the world. This article explores how memory of place as a vital part of the migrant-survivor family has a transgenerational effect. Growing up with narratives of the landscapes of pre-war Jewish European life created a double sense of dislocation from the former generational site in children of survivors: both in time and in space. Reading two Jewish Australian memoirs – Lily Brett’s Between Mexico and Poland (2003) and Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) – this article investigates the ‘return’ journeys of both authors to Poland. I argue that the parents’ former homelands hold great significance in their children’s lives, that journeys to actual locations of family memory are an attempt to uncover memory in situ and to inte- grate the spaces of pre-Holocaust past into their Second Generation life narratives. Such journeys uncover that, while a home, a family or a community are not to be found anymore, the literal, physical places of the parents’ past still exist and evoke a certain familiarity, as a result of the memory narratives that suffused the post-Holocaust family.
In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially throu... more In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today's Israel and Palestine.In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today’s Israel and Palestine. This article analyses Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-6) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010), and Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) to demonstrate how graphic artists update the long cultural tradition of travel to the Holy Land representations. I argue that graphic novels are a contemporary chapter in portrayals of what the corpus describes as a decidedly unholy land of conflict.
Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on... more Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on victims' families, and the significant role of "memory work" by survivors' children within the broader frame of cultural memory in the English-speaking countries of post-war Jewish diasporas. It studies how these authors explore the past in their literary texts – primarily life writing. By identifying key areas where memory manifests and can be traced – family objects, given names, bodies, food, the memorial uses of the Passover Seder, and the attacks of 9/11 – it shows how the Second Generation engages with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival. Departing from prevailing trauma studies approaches, Nina Fischer builds an argument for the positive achievements of memory work by Second Generation writers in reconnecting with their family's pre-Holocaust life, a "usable past", in spite of horrific loss.
Nina Fischer analyzes the memory work of children of Holocaust survivors as presented in publishe... more Nina Fischer analyzes the memory work of children of Holocaust survivors as presented in published life writings and fictional texts. She identifies a number of specific features in the writing of the Second Generation, and she traces those in thematically organized chapters. The great value of her book is that it goes beyond a descriptive listing of themes and leitmotifs and, instead, demonstrates how the children of survivors interact with their parents' experiences and stories over time. As opposed to a videotaped or otherwise archived testimony of a survivor, the literary texts of children of survivors are not merely receptacles for their parents' stories but a medium through which they work with, remediate and re-purpose the past. Actively making sense of, and bringing perspective to, their experiences of having grown up in the intimate settings of a survivor family, the Second Generation engages in what Fischer aptly calls " memory work, " which she defines as an " individual's conscious voluntary, and methodical interrogation of the past within collective frameworks " (2). She focuses on familial settings, because it is there that most of the memory work of the Second Generation takes place. Those who witness survivor testimony occasionally can safely return to a world untainted by calamity. Children of survivors do not have this option. Traumatic memories in their families are present in the intimate rhythms of everyday life, accentuated at special occasions (like yahrzeit or holy days), symbolically condensed in names and objects, and sometimes they erupted in the form of eccentric behavior. Coming to terms with their parents' past through writing is, according to Fischer, a relational task. It is an attempt at making sense of childhood experiences and, at the same time, at gaining adult perspectives on their parents—through the venues of family biography, historical knowledge, psychological interpretation, preservation of their parents' voice (from interviews to retrieved letters), physical visits to the lost homes in Europe, and descriptions of their families post-1945 migrant status. Fischer suggests that the terms " trans-generational life-writing " (Victoria Stewart) or " relational life writing " (John Eakin) well describe the literary oeuvre produced by the Second Generation. The goal of such relational memory work is to turn their parents' experiences into a " usable past "
Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and ... more Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and Germany' of Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical an... more Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical analogy and cultural shorthand, it functions as a powerful Palestinian weapon when used to describe Israeli policy and actions in what amounts to a battle of narratives in the international arena. For a long time, Palestinians have been known primarily for their violent struggle, but employing loaded vocabulary to depict their lives and experiences under Israeli control is more than just using a certain word, it is a strategic choice. The earliest uses of the apartheid analogy have long been placed in the 1970s, however, evidence of its use can already be found before the United Nation’s General Assembly declared apartheid a crime in 1973. The first instances happened simultaneously with the development of the organized Palestinian national movement in the 1960s. Focusing on Fayez Sayegh (1922–1980), an academic and UN special rapporteur to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, I argue such historical analogies need to be read as a nonviolent tactic of resistance within the Palestinian struggle. Sayegh was almost singlehandedly responsible for introducing the apartheid analogy at the United Nations – my primary contextual interest. His analyses of racial segregation, however, were thoroughly countered, making his engagement for Palestine seem like a failure. And yet his early attempts to bring the apartheid analogy into wide circulation, along with the increasingly more complicated situation on the ground, show results. Today, the term has become common usage in describing Israel and puts enormous pressure on the country. The spread of the apartheid analogy shows that non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance, which in the 1960s and 1970s were almost invisible internationally, long existed.
Sartre, Jews and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race, and Gender edited by Manuela Consonni and Vivian Liska. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. (Vidal Sassoon Series in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice 1). , 2020
Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, o... more Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, often taking the form of competitive victimhood, as supporters of both sides politicize the memory of the genocide for their political gain. In her 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian-American Susan Abulhawa interweaves a Palestinian narrative of history-including the Nakba, that is, the destruction of historical Palestine in 1948, the ongoing conflict and the Israeli occupation-with Holocaust memory. By acknowledging rather than minimizing or denying the Israelis' cultural trauma, she takes a stance of empathy, which researchers consider a prerequisite for peaceful conflict transformation. I contend that Mornings in Jenin exemplifies how cultural texts not only provide a space to explore how new mnemonic links are being drawn up against contested and reified national narratives in Israel/Palestine but also play a political role by performing a narrative that acknowledges the cultural trauma of the other side.
Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others edited by Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev., 2019
In Spatialising Peace and Conflict: Mapping the Production of Place, Sites and Scales of Violence, edited by Annika Björkdahl and Susanne Buckley-Zistel. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan., 2016
Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, ... more Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.
As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is o... more As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is one of the most culturally significant and often-imagined landscapes in the world. Today, this landscape is the setting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has witnessed violence throughout history, but, with the erection of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, conflict is now physically inscribed into the land. The barrier has received global attention, not only in the media, but also in a range of cultural products, including (illustrated) books, graphic novels, and films. However, scholarship has yet to address explorations of the structure, which has a marked visual and visceral effect, in aesthetic media. This article uses methodologies developed by memory studies to analyse a number of such cultural interrogations of the barrier, including Christmas Card, a viral image ascribed to the street artist Banksy, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape by Raja Shehadeh, and the Simone Bitton’s documentary film Mur/Wall. I argue that all these works reference cultural memories related to the Holy Land and evoke the loss of the biblical landscape. In such invocations, the current conflict is grafted onto cultural memory in order to mediate it for geographically disparate audiences and to create awareness of the contemporary situation in this all but holy land.
Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling t... more Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures.
Migrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust ... more Migrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the locations of family and community in Europe have been destroyed culturally and physically and have become ‘lost places’. Lives of Holocaust survivors are rarely thought about from the perspective of migrant biographies, even though only very few survivors returned to live in their former hometowns after liberation, but instead moved to countries around the world. This article explores how memory of place as a vital part of the migrant-survivor family has a transgenerational effect. Growing up with narratives of the landscapes of pre-war Jewish European life created a double sense of dislocation from the former generational site in children of survivors: both in time and in space. Reading two Jewish Australian memoirs – Lily Brett’s Between Mexico and Poland (2003) and Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) – this article investigates the ‘return’ journeys of both authors to Poland. I argue that the parents’ former homelands hold great significance in their children’s lives, that journeys to actual locations of family memory are an attempt to uncover memory in situ and to inte- grate the spaces of pre-Holocaust past into their Second Generation life narratives. Such journeys uncover that, while a home, a family or a community are not to be found anymore, the literal, physical places of the parents’ past still exist and evoke a certain familiarity, as a result of the memory narratives that suffused the post-Holocaust family.
In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially throu... more In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today's Israel and Palestine.In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today’s Israel and Palestine. This article analyses Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-6) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010), and Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) to demonstrate how graphic artists update the long cultural tradition of travel to the Holy Land representations. I argue that graphic novels are a contemporary chapter in portrayals of what the corpus describes as a decidedly unholy land of conflict.
This essay proposes that Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive is an intentional American rewrite of her Germ... more This essay proposes that Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive is an intentional American rewrite of her German autobiography. Using different strategies of adaptation and cross-cultural translation, Klüger transforms her life story into a contemporary Jewish-American autobiography. This re-inscription of memories, especially those of her youth in Vienna, her Holocaust survival and migration into a different memory community is done to create ‘thick’ relations with, and ethically and intellectually engage, her American readership. By recreating her autobiography as American, Klüger highlights transnational aspects of Holocaust memory, but inscribes her past within national containers of memory. She does this to bring the Holocaust home to America, rather than portraying it as a locally or temporally distant event.
One aspect of post-Holocaust Jewish life to which little attention has been
paid in the study of... more One aspect of post-Holocaust Jewish life to which little attention has been paid in the study of Holocaust literature is the experience of migration. This article examines three Canadian Second Generation Holocaust memoirs and their portrayal of migration. Memoirs by Jewish-Canadian authors prove to be particularly beneficial for analyzing aspects of migration because the immigration of Canada’s survivors often took place when their children were old enough to consciously experience it. Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989), and Elaine Kalman Naves’s Shoshanna’s Story (2003) all depict the challenges of the arrival to 1950s Canada. The memoirs explore the ways in which the young immigrants cope with dislocation, alienation, and belonging. Against the backdrop of a traumatic family history, they experience different forms of ‘cultural crossings’ – for instance, with re- gard to language, the immigrant’s body, or religious identity. The focus on migration in Second Generation memoirs highlights the transnational and transcultural rather than merely the transgenerational features of Holocaust memory.
This paper examines Jonathan Kellerman’s 1988 novel “The Butcher’s Theatre” as a means to represe... more This paper examines Jonathan Kellerman’s 1988 novel “The Butcher’s Theatre” as a means to represent Jerusalem’s citizenry and cityscape. The generic characteristics of the detective novel allow for a realistic depiction and investigation of contemporary Jerusalem and its multiple social and political problems. Kellerman highlights the multicultural and multi- religious features of the city instead of representing it as a topos of cultural memory.
Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries, 2019
In interfaith meetings in Israel/Palestine, joint symbols and rituals are often included as one o... more In interfaith meetings in Israel/Palestine, joint symbols and rituals are often included as one of the unifying elements in the common struggle toward coexistence and peace. Such practices are in line with what scholars have identified as areas of transformative potential in interreligious encounters. However, in this contested area, both Palestinians and Israelis also choose prayer as a weapon in their political conflict. Given the religious and political intersections of the conflict especially in Jerusalem, religious acts can thus function as political performances and are acts of contestation rather than conflict transformation, an area of research that has yet to receive scholarly attention.
Approaching Second Generation literature as memory work, I explored in this study how the childre... more Approaching Second Generation literature as memory work, I explored in this study how the children of Holocaust survivors delve into their families’ pasts to learn about their parents’ survival and about familial origins that predate the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. Using the lens of memory work has enabled me to demonstrate that, despite the distinctiveness of the experience of being born into a family of survivors, and even if it is not always possible to uncover a usable past, neither the literary corpus nor the human position are shaped by rupture, parental trauma, and truncated transmitted memory alone.
In recent years, we have witnessed a growing preoccupation with memory in public discourses and i... more In recent years, we have witnessed a growing preoccupation with memory in public discourses and in academia, with respect to both individual and collective memorial forms. Our times are characterized by considerations and articulations of the meaning of the past in the present, as we see in discussions about the if, where, and how of the United States National Slavery Museum; in the long path to the official apology made in 2008 by Australia’s government for its crimes against the country’s Indigenous populations; or the increase in migrant families’ ‘memory tourism’ to places of origin. In On Collective Memory, one of the seminal studies on memory beyond the individual, sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argues that communication is needed to create memory, asserting that memory is not ‘just there’; rather, it is a process and an activity (1992). Memory is in the hands of many: political decision-makers and private individuals, museums and memorials, life writing authors and documentary filmmakers, to name but a few. From a theoretical perspective, the emerging interdisciplinary field of memory studies has turned to the forms, media, and processes of remembering and forgetting. What unites all these endeavors is a dialogue with the past; whatever form it takes, these efforts show that memory requires and receives humankind’s attention and action.
Abstract As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy L... more Abstract As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is one of the most culturally significant and often-imagined landscapes in the world. Today, this landscape is the setting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has witnessed violence throughout history, but, with the erection of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, conflict is now physically inscribed into the land. The barrier has received global attention, not only in the media, but also in a range of cultural products, including (illustrated) books, graphic novels, and films. However, scholarship has yet to address explorations of the structure, which has a marked visual and visceral effect, in aesthetic media. This article uses methodologies developed by memory studies to analyse a number of such cultural interrogations of the barrier, including Christmas Card, a viral image ascribed to the street artist Banksy, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape by Raja Shehadeh, and the Simone Bitton’s documentary film Mur/Wall. I argue that all these works reference cultural memories related to the Holy Land and evoke the loss of the biblical landscape. In such invocations, the current conflict is grafted onto cultural memory in order to mediate it for geographically disparate audiences and to create awareness of the contemporary situation in this all but holy land.
This paper examines Jonathan Kellerman’s 1988 novel “The Butcher’s Theatre” as a means to represe... more This paper examines Jonathan Kellerman’s 1988 novel “The Butcher’s Theatre” as a means to represent Jerusalem’s citizenry and cityscape. The generic characteristics of the detective novel allow for a realistic depiction and investigation of contemporary Jerusalem and its multiple social and political problems. Kellerman highlights the multicultural and multireligious features of the city instead of representing it as a topos of cultural memory.
Wem gehört Jerusalem? Der Konflikt zwischen Israelis und Palästinensern in dieser Frage scheint ... more Wem gehört Jerusalem? Der Konflikt zwischen Israelis und Palästinensern in dieser Frage scheint unlösbar zu sein. Widerstreitende Narrative auf den beiden Seiten machen die Situation so verfahren, sie sollen in einem geplanten Projekt an der Goethe-Universität näher untersucht werden
Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, ... more Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.
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paid in the study of Holocaust literature is the experience of migration. This article
examines three Canadian Second Generation Holocaust memoirs and their portrayal
of migration. Memoirs by Jewish-Canadian authors prove to be particularly beneficial
for analyzing aspects of migration because the immigration of Canada’s survivors often
took place when their children were old enough to consciously experience it. Lisa
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989), and
Elaine Kalman Naves’s Shoshanna’s Story (2003) all depict the challenges of the arrival
to 1950s Canada. The memoirs explore the ways in which the young immigrants cope
with dislocation, alienation, and belonging. Against the backdrop of a traumatic family
history, they experience different forms of ‘cultural crossings’ – for instance, with re-
gard to language, the immigrant’s body, or religious identity. The focus on migration
in Second Generation memoirs highlights the transnational and transcultural rather than
merely the transgenerational features of Holocaust memory.