“The Capital of the Ruins”: Reading THE MEMORY MONSTER by Yishai Sarid

• In Event: New Approaches to Hebrew Literature

Abstract

“I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” Samuel Beckett, ENDGAME


This paper explores the complexity of integrating, communicating, and maintaining the ambitious project of Holocaust-memory and the literary representations of this complexity in Yishai Sarid’s latest book, THE MEMORY MONSTER (2017). Sarid’s book presents the crisis caused by the impossibility of integrating the traumatic experience of the past with imperative questions that constitute the Israeli existence in the present. By processing the supremacy of memory and the act of remembering alongside the disintegration, corruption, and distortion of subjectivity, Sarid not only sheds new light on the collapse of collective memory, but also defamiliarizes its economy, and exemplifies its transformation from an abstract possession into a palpable, libidinal, and violent space. Sarid’s book forms a type of subjectivity whose failure to function as an agency of this collective memory is anchored in a wider social failure to preserve and address national continuity through the processing of traumatic experiences.

My essay examines inter-generational relationships and tensions in the context of memory, trauma, and witnessing. For this, I rely on Kelly Oliver (2001), Dori Laub (2013), and Claudia Weltz (2016) whose works probe the questions of subjectivity, identity, testimonial, and witnessing. I read THE MEMORY MONSTER as part of Sarid’s larger literary project in which he crafts a “humanity in ruins” that undermines the integrity of the national system and retrieves liminality as an inevitable alternative.

Author

• Riki Traum Avidan, Fairleigh Dickinson University