Dana Mihăilescu is Associate Professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest. She was a Fulbright Junior Visiting Researcher at Brandeis University in 2008-2009 and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Crown Family Center of Jewish and Israel Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University from 1 September 2021 to 31 August 2022. She earned her Ph.D. in Philology at the University of Bucharest in January 2010, with a dissertation entitled Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. Her main research interests include Jewish American Studies; Holocaust survivor testimonies; graphic narratives and Holocaust representation; trauma and witnessing; ethics and memory; migration from Eastern Europe to the United States. She has examined how memory and the ethics of remembrance function for the immigrant generations of Eastern European Jews coming to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, as reflected in narratives of authors born in the Pale of Settlement (e.g. Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska) or Romania (Konrad Bercovici, M.E. Ravage, Maurice Samuel). She is also interested in how memory works for Holocaust child survivors and for the 2nd and 3rd (plus) generations, and how its complex paths influence fiction writing and history-making.
The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience... more The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience and memory, and their challenges for new generations, as established in important studies by Hillary Chute, Victoria Aarons, Ole Frahm et al., and Matt Reingold. Continuing in these scholars’ footsteps, I will explore a new direction of Holocaust representation in (auto)biographical graphic narratives over the past few years: that of addressing not just the traumatic aspects of the Holocaust but also the importance of acts of solidarity as resistance during and after World War II in ensuring survival and (self-)care. I will assess this aspect of representation in But I Live, a volume edited by Charlotte Schallié comprising three graphic narratives of child survivors from Romania and the Netherlands, the products of collaboration with well-known graphic artists from North America (Miriam Libicki), Israel (Gilad Seliktar), and Germany (Barbara Yelin).
One of the most interesting cases of political instrumentalization, selectiveness, and distortion... more One of the most interesting cases of political instrumentalization, selectiveness, and distortion of historical memory under the Romanian Communist regime was the case of the public remembrance of the Fascist/Nazi era and its atrocities in conjunction with the over-emphasis on the Communist resistance to it. The authors examine these aspects by means of Jewish Communist Matei Gall’s autobiographic narratives focusing on World War II violence over a forty-year time span. These include Masacrul, published as a novel in 1956, in Communist Romania, based on two articles that initially appeared in the Communist party’s newspaper România liberă in September 1944; and Eclipsa, published as a memoir in post-Communist Romania in 1997. The authors also consider two interviews Gall gave in 2009, and what they added to his previous life narratives as well as how generally his narratives, spanning from the immediate postwar context to the 2000s, contribute to Communist and post-Communist mnemonic frameworks of the Holocaust in Romania.
This article considers the dynamics of the memories of World War II for survivors who give multip... more This article considers the dynamics of the memories of World War II for survivors who give multiple accounts of their experiences over time. I compare five testimonies with different medial content given in 1944, 1983, and 1996 by Ruth Glasberg Gold. In November 1941, at the age of eleven, she was deported with her parents and brother from Czernowitz to the Bershad ghetto, Transnistria, where she lost her family and was orphaned. My major interest is to examine how Glasberg Gold’s memories over time intersect with changes of medium, location, language, and temporal context, and might have brought different or similar emphases in her written, audio, and video testimonies of the Holocaust. I believe her case to be important for scholarly analysis as it allows one to explore how the developing personality of a Holocaust survivor and changing media environments intersect and relate to how memories of the Holocaust become shaped, rehashed, and modified over time.
Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2020
This paper examines two graphic memoirs by Martin Lemelman that bring together contrasting points... more This paper examines two graphic memoirs by Martin Lemelman that bring together contrasting points of view about the Holocaust and Jewish identity: Mendel's Daughter (2006) focuses on the Holocaust from the perspective of the author's mother, a Holocaust survivor, as passed down to the son born after the end of World War II; its follow-up, Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood (2010), continues the story of Lemelman's family through the author's Brooklyn boyhood, referencing the role of the Holocaust in his early years. My paper probes the memories and struggles specific to each generation from Lemelman's family in relation to one's assumed identity during and after World War II, in Eastern Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested in examining how the entanglements of transcultural, transmedial, and transgenerational memories of the Holocaust give rise to an ethical engagement with World War II and images of spaces where genocide happened. In this sense, I will compare the parallel images of Poland during World War II (now Ukraine) from Mendel's Daughter and those of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s from Two Cents Plain in which various generations' perspectives clash or coalesce, bringing forth an ethical commitment to the remembrance of war and life in its aftermath via permanent alertness and vigilance to the development of sociopolitical structures in various locales.
This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women - Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and H... more This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women - Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar - to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch's part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children's identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation's peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one's 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.
Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive. Eds. Eva Fogelman, Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dalia Ofer, Mar 30, 2017
The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience... more The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience and memory, and their challenges for new generations, as established in important studies by Hillary Chute, Victoria Aarons, Ole Frahm et al., and Matt Reingold. Continuing in these scholars’ footsteps, I will explore a new direction of Holocaust representation in (auto)biographical graphic narratives over the past few years: that of addressing not just the traumatic aspects of the Holocaust but also the importance of acts of solidarity as resistance during and after World War II in ensuring survival and (self-)care. I will assess this aspect of representation in But I Live, a volume edited by Charlotte Schallié comprising three graphic narratives of child survivors from Romania and the Netherlands, the products of collaboration with well-known graphic artists from North America (Miriam Libicki), Israel (Gilad Seliktar), and Germany (Barbara Yelin).
One of the most interesting cases of political instrumentalization, selectiveness, and distortion... more One of the most interesting cases of political instrumentalization, selectiveness, and distortion of historical memory under the Romanian Communist regime was the case of the public remembrance of the Fascist/Nazi era and its atrocities in conjunction with the over-emphasis on the Communist resistance to it. The authors examine these aspects by means of Jewish Communist Matei Gall’s autobiographic narratives focusing on World War II violence over a forty-year time span. These include Masacrul, published as a novel in 1956, in Communist Romania, based on two articles that initially appeared in the Communist party’s newspaper România liberă in September 1944; and Eclipsa, published as a memoir in post-Communist Romania in 1997. The authors also consider two interviews Gall gave in 2009, and what they added to his previous life narratives as well as how generally his narratives, spanning from the immediate postwar context to the 2000s, contribute to Communist and post-Communist mnemonic frameworks of the Holocaust in Romania.
This article considers the dynamics of the memories of World War II for survivors who give multip... more This article considers the dynamics of the memories of World War II for survivors who give multiple accounts of their experiences over time. I compare five testimonies with different medial content given in 1944, 1983, and 1996 by Ruth Glasberg Gold. In November 1941, at the age of eleven, she was deported with her parents and brother from Czernowitz to the Bershad ghetto, Transnistria, where she lost her family and was orphaned. My major interest is to examine how Glasberg Gold’s memories over time intersect with changes of medium, location, language, and temporal context, and might have brought different or similar emphases in her written, audio, and video testimonies of the Holocaust. I believe her case to be important for scholarly analysis as it allows one to explore how the developing personality of a Holocaust survivor and changing media environments intersect and relate to how memories of the Holocaust become shaped, rehashed, and modified over time.
Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2020
This paper examines two graphic memoirs by Martin Lemelman that bring together contrasting points... more This paper examines two graphic memoirs by Martin Lemelman that bring together contrasting points of view about the Holocaust and Jewish identity: Mendel's Daughter (2006) focuses on the Holocaust from the perspective of the author's mother, a Holocaust survivor, as passed down to the son born after the end of World War II; its follow-up, Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood (2010), continues the story of Lemelman's family through the author's Brooklyn boyhood, referencing the role of the Holocaust in his early years. My paper probes the memories and struggles specific to each generation from Lemelman's family in relation to one's assumed identity during and after World War II, in Eastern Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested in examining how the entanglements of transcultural, transmedial, and transgenerational memories of the Holocaust give rise to an ethical engagement with World War II and images of spaces where genocide happened. In this sense, I will compare the parallel images of Poland during World War II (now Ukraine) from Mendel's Daughter and those of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s from Two Cents Plain in which various generations' perspectives clash or coalesce, bringing forth an ethical commitment to the remembrance of war and life in its aftermath via permanent alertness and vigilance to the development of sociopolitical structures in various locales.
This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women - Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and H... more This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women - Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar - to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch's part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children's identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation's peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one's 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.
Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive. Eds. Eva Fogelman, Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dalia Ofer, Mar 30, 2017
The compelling argument of Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for ... more The compelling argument of Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition is that narratives of Eastern European Jewish Americans are important discourses offering a response to America's norms of assimilation, rationalized progress, and control in the early twentieth century under the guise of commitment to the specificity of individual experiences. The book sheds light on how these texts suggest an alternative ethical agency that encompasses both mainstream and minority practices and capitalizes on the need to keep alive individual responsibility and vulnerability as the only means to actually create a democratic culture. This book opens up novel areas of inquiry and research for both the academic world and the social and cultural fields, facilitating the rediscovery of long-neglected Eastern European Jewish American writers and the rethinking of the more familiar authors addressed. For further details, see the publisher's website: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498563895/Eastern-European-Jewish-American-Narratives-1890–1930-Struggles-for-Recognition
This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are i... more This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps’ focus on “postcolonial witnessing” and its cross-cultural dimension (2013).
The review commends Stańczyk’s lucid deconstruction of the trope of wartime childhood as a discur... more The review commends Stańczyk’s lucid deconstruction of the trope of wartime childhood as a discursive category and a social construct in contemporary Polish commemorative culture. It also pinpoints how the well-chosen terms she proposes to define the Poles’ affective responses to it represent a seminal contribution to the study of children of World War II that will certainly inspire further scholarly developments in the case of Poland and comparative or kindred assessments in the case of other East/Central European states.
Review available at this link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.98.2.0393
The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor. Eds. Geoffroy de Laforcade, Daniel Stein, and Cathy C. Waegner. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 85-111.
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Papers by Dana Mihailescu
For further details, see the publisher's website: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498563895/Eastern-European-Jewish-American-Narratives-1890–1930-Struggles-for-Recognition
Review available at this link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.98.2.0393