Naslov
(Re)Writing the Holocaust in Aharon Appelfeld's and Daša Drndić's Novels: Lost and Found Languages

Autori
Levanat-Peričić, Miranda

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u zbornicima skupova, cjeloviti rad (in extenso), znanstveni

Izvornik
Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Experiences, Positions, Memories / Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate ; Terpitz, Olaf - Beč : Köln : Böhlau Verlag, 2021, 375-394

ISBN
978-3-205-21289-8

Skup
Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Experiences Positions Memory

Mjesto i datum
Graz, Austrija, 16.09.2019. - 18.09.2019

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
(post)Holocaust writing, transmitting the trauma, documentary novels, Aharon Appelfeld, Daša Drndić

Sažetak
Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was an Israeli writer from Bucovina who wrote in Hebrew, recalling in his prose almost exclusively Eastern Europe, the lost Jewish world of Czernowitz. Among the many stories, he wrote on the basis of his experiences as a survivor of the Shoah, there is one – Sippur Hayyim, 1999 (The Story of a Life, 2004) – which is partly included as intertext in the novel Totenwande by the Croatian authoress Daša Drndić (1946–2018). Although Appelfeld’s and Drndić’s thematic foci are mostly the same, i.e. – the (post)Holocaust world with alienation, displacement and exile as frequent motifs – their style and genre choice differ significantly. While Appelfeld started in his writing from his own traumatic experience without any openly expressed social engagement, Daša Drndić wrote about the Holocaust from an outside position, as a non-Jewish writer who embraced the responsibility to transmit the experience of trauma, explicitly accusing post-Holocaust Europe for being built on the looting of Jewish property. In contrast to Appelfeld who tried to escape from historical facts and documents and who did write about unutterable emotions, Drndić incorporated in her prose documents, photos, court records, original testimonies and lists of victims’ names. Settling in Palestine in 1946, Appelfeld learnt Hebrew but rarely recollects and depicts his childhood memories in this language. After leaving her former life in Belgrade in the 1990s, Daša Drndić also had to learn the “new” form of Croatian. Although she did it so reluctantly, this inspired her to a creative research of language and style. However, while Appelfeld style is minimalistic, full of silence and pauses which have to be filled by the reader, Drndić’s novels are full of facts and ready-made material that need to be read carefully by the reader as well who will be able to differentiate between the factual and the fictional. Furthermore, the most interesting question is how Daša Drndić connects the Holocaust narrative with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In his book Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988) James E. Young suggested that literary and historical truths of the Holocaust may not be entirely separable. Starting from his statement that difference between “hard history” and “softness in their literary reconstruction” is kind of a false problem, this paper will explore the different genre choices in writing trauma and the plurality of meanings generated with different discourses, reaching from the (pseudo)autobiographic to the (meta)historiographical.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA