The Fidelity of Memory: Nostalgia, Narration, and Sentimentality
In this study, I examine three texts by female Jewish authors in order to compare their use of sentimentality and nostalgia. Cynthia Ozick’s 1987 novella, Rosa, offers a paradigmatic (fictional) example of the Holocaust survivor’s “imperative to tell” her story. Rosa lives in a state of perpetual memory, or nostalgia, a condition where “such memories are not memories at all, since their content has not been relegated to the past.” Rosa’s daily life is filled with unremitting pain brought about by her memories of the Holocaust and her life before the war. Her relief from these moments of traumatic remembering come only when she is able to narrate them, in letters to her daughter or in telling her story to others. She does not seek to forget her past; in fact, she pursues the narration of her past, sentimentalizing it even as the narration seems to duplicate the horror of the original trauma.
Ruth Kluger’s 2001 memoir, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered is similarly narrated with the mark of nostalgia. Ruth struggles with the condescension of her American relatives who tell her that “you have to erase from your memory everything that happened in Europe.” But the memories include everything, even what happened before the war. They ARE her life, the only thing at that time she owns for sure. As she shapes her story for an audience, she reveals the extent of her loss even as she struggles not to betray her own history and the corresponding nostalgia she feels for it.
In a very different way, Eva Hoffman examines nostalgia as a “source of poetry...a form of fidelity.” In Lost in Translation, her memoir of life as a Polish exile in Canada and the USA, she describes coming-of-age in an environment where the Holocaust was the unacknowledged defining element. The inheritance of that genocidal legacy was a potent weight reminding her not to cause her parents any additional grief, but the memories of what for her was a sweet past are impossible to forget. Hoffman alludes to the “clarifying process of writing” her memoir as the origin for understanding the Holocaust as a powerful theme and element in her life.”
Click here to return to TOP of Conference Program
Use the browser's BACK button to return to the session you were viewing.
© 2004 ROCKY MOUNTAIN MODERN LANGUAGE
ASSOCIATION |