Language:
English
Year of publication:
2000
Titel der Quelle:
Poetics Today
Angaben zur Quelle:
21,3 (2000) 543-559
Keywords:
Wilkomirski, Binjamin.
;
Wiesel, Élie,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Holocaust survivors
Abstract:
Contrasts two works published as memoirs of the Holocaust, Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Bruchstücke" ["Fragments"] (1996) and Elie Wiesel's "Tous les fleuves vont à la mer" (1994). Defines the former as a "deluded memoir" or an "eloquent deception", i.e. a fake that raises questions about the borders between literature and psychopathology, with an author whose fantasy involves the "obsessive pursuit of a Holocaust identity". Contends that "Fragments" should not be seen as a contribution to Holocaust denial. Wiesel's memoir offers a revision of an incident described in his first work, "La nuit" (1982), regarding the deportation of his family to Auschwitz. Differences between the original Yiddish and then French and subsequent English versions regarding the first sexual stirrings or fantasies of the young autobiographical hero are taken not as falsification but as attempts to get closer to reality, to truth. This is depicted as the workings of personal memory, not "borrowed" memory à la Wilkomirski.
Note:
Another version appeared as "Do facts matter in Holocaust memoirs? Wilkomirski/Wiesel" in her "Crises of Memory and the Second World War" (2006) 159-177, and in "Obliged by Memory" (2006) 21-42.
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