Fictitious Remembering & the Spectral: Contemporary Polish-Jewish Literature

• In Event: Dybbuks, Demons, and Hauntings: Images of Possession in Jewish Eastern Europe

Abstract

How is memory collected after the Holocaust? How can literature serve as an archive for memory? What belongs in an archive? This paper explores these questions in the literary works of Hanna Krall and Agata Tuszyńska. In their writings, seemingly disjointed pieces of Jewishness found in Poland are used to piece together narratives. Memories are often collected beyond the apparent parameters of the archive and some memories are assumed by the authors—acts of “fictitious remembering” which help to fill the blanks of accessible memory. The spectral—ghosts, dybbuks, and spirits—is likewise used to reconcile the disjointed present to the inaccessible past. Krall’s short story “Dybuk” (1995) tells the story of Adam S., an American man possessed by the spirit of his brother who died in the Holocaust. “Dybuk” adapts S. Ansky’s canonical and beloved Yiddish play THE DYBBUK, OR BETWEEN TWO WORLDS as a dybbuk emerges to put the present world back in order: Adam S.’s dybbuk compels him to explore the Polish countryside, visiting small towns he has no direct connection to. Adam S.’s is just one narrative that Krall collects through her writings in post-Holocaust Poland, adding it to her archive alongside noteworthy interviews like that with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The spectral is used by Krall to explain uncanny phenomena of post-Holocaust Poland. Tuszyńska’s memoir RODZINNA HISTORIA LĘKU (2005) [FAMILY HISTORY OF FEAR (2006)] pieces together the author’s Jewishness through memories, historical research, and explorations of the Polish countryside. The memoir concludes with an imagining of Tuszyńska’s dead relatives—whom she never got to meet—visiting her in her home; their ghosts become the only suitable witnesses to her grief. Both authors approach non-fiction writing in innovative ways that collect memory, which I will argue are methods of MAL D’ARCHIVE, which enable fictitious remembering. My examination of “Dybuk” and RODZINNA HISTORIA LĘKU in this paper will enable me to rethink how MAL D’ARCHIVE influences authors’ relationships with the spectral in contemporary Poland and how engagements with the spectral allow “fictitious memory” to reclaim but also to displace memory.

Author

• Lizy Mostowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign