Politeja (Jul 2015)
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Abstract
Henri Raczymow’s term of mémoire trouée – memory with holes – is often understood as a synonym to Marian Hirsch’s “postmemory”. Even though there is a semantic connection between these two concepts, it seems important to point out differences between them. Mémoire trouée concept was presented by Raczymow in 1986 on the Jewish Writers Conference. The essay became a collective voice of Jewish immigrants in France. What is this “hole” in the memory? How did it appear? What are literary methods of description of this void? Most of all, this void has its “double” – emptiness in the “shtetl memory” and emptiness in the “Shoah memory”. The aim of this article is to analyze Raczymow’s essay, especially his conception of “the second generation’s” writing; to interpret voids in the memory in the Jewish experience and literary transposition of mémoire trouée in Raczymow novels.
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