The Burden of Memory: Lezioni di tenebra

Abstract

Born in 1964 in Germany to Polish Jewish parents, writer Helena Janeczek considers Italy in all respects to be her adopted country and her central point of cultural reference. Janeczek is an emblematic exponent of second-generation Holocaust writers in that her artistic and public engagement typifies the ways in which Shoah children’s search for identity shapes itself: initially as a sociopsychological path of recovery and then moves onto larger epistemological venues. Examining her literary contribution to Shoah representation means also further investigating representative limits precisely because, by writing of the disaster, Janeczek presents aspects of writing the imagined.