Slovo a Smysl (Aug 2015)
Josef Bors Roman Opuštěná panenka zwischen Faktizität und Fiktionalität // Josef Bor’s Novel The Abandoned Doll in Between Facticity and Fictionality
Abstract
The paper presents the Czech-Jewish writer Josef Bor (1906–1979) and his first published book, the novel Opuštěná panenka / The Abandoned Doll (1961). Bor’s topic here was his own personal experience of the Holocaust: from his deportation to Terezín and later to Auschwitz, where he loses his entire family including two little daughters, via captivity in other concentration camps and „marches of death“ all the way to liberation, occurring in his case close to Jena, Germany. On the basis of these prominently autobiographic references, the reviewers often emphasized that the work has primarily documentary character. The present essay, on the other hand, views The Abandoned Doll primarily as a literary fiction wherein the fate of the protagonist and his family is, rather than documentary, of an exemplary, symbolic nature. The primary goal of the novel is not to represent a particular authentic case but rather to give a broad idea, anchored in a particular case, of the functioning of the Holocaust as a machinery of total humiliation and systematic killing
