Tips against “Numbness” for New Generations: For a Collective Useful Memory of the Shoah and a Global Novel: Janeczek’s Postcolonial Thought

Abstract

Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust shares with Helena Janeczek’s Lezioni di tenebra many parameters of investigation used for the retrieval of memory of the event and the significance of this retrieval for the survivors’ children. These are the parameters Maurice Halbwachs points at as central for the process of formation of collective memory in his eponymous study. Such metrics exact the notion of a living history whose contours are rather different from those defined by the historical memory (or history tout court). Living history is a history in constant renegotiation with itself, that finds material in individual notions, in information exchange, and reflections that go well beyond data and statistics. To the point, statistics is the first element that Epstein considers superfluous: “I did not need to know the statistics when I was a child. I knew my parents had crossed over a chasm, and that each of them had crossed it alone” (12–13). Emerging from the abyss, her parents found in their daughter “their first companion, a new leaf” which “had to be pure life”:

This leaf was as different from death as good was from evil and the present from the past. It was evidence of the power of life over the power of destruction. It was proof that they had not died themselves. The door that led to that special room was secret; the place had to be protected. (13)