Critic Ellen Fine's phrase, "Absent Memory" for Post-Holocaust literature captures for me a thread of the tapestry of this summer's Poland experience. On the surface, an oxymoron, yet suggestively unstable, it can refer to both the memory of the Jewish community and its disappearance: For example, the Lodz Jewish Cemetery suggests both the "memory" of the Jewish community that once thrived in Lodz and its "absence," its disappearance, in the return of nature--trees, bushes, grasses enveloping the tombstones.
This same instability of absence/presence seemed to me to haunt many of our experiences: The Kazimierz Jewish section of Krakow with its Jewish restaurants and shops--absent of Jews, tours and guides of Jewish museums and concentration camps led by non-Jews. Absent Memory. Memory both present, vital, painful and vanished.
Critic Ellen Fine's phrase, "Absent Memory" for Post-Holocaust literature captures for me a thread of the tapestry of this summer's Poland experience. On the surface, an oxymoron, yet suggestively unstable, it can refer to both the memory of the Jewish community and its disappearance: For example, the Lodz Jewish Cemetery suggests both the "memory" of the Jewish community that once thrived in Lodz and its "absence," its disappearance, in the return of nature--trees, bushes, grasses enveloping the tombstones.
ReplyDeleteThis same instability of absence/presence seemed to me to haunt many of our experiences: The Kazimierz Jewish section of Krakow with its Jewish restaurants and shops--absent of Jews, tours and guides of Jewish museums and concentration camps led by non-Jews. Absent Memory. Memory both present, vital, painful and vanished.