The possibility of being a Jew: An autoethnographic journey from shattered memory to the memorial body

Abstract

Through the story of my relationship with Jewishness, I propose a journey that begins with internalised stigma, moves through the recognition of the trauma of the Holocaust within me and ends with the reconstitution of an anguished body as a living memory of the Holocaust. The construction of this text is a performative exercise in constituting a new inscription in the cultural narrative of the transmission of trauma. Autoethnographic writing forces me to remember, to interpret my body and to dig through my deceased mother’s belongings in order to constitute a new memory. In this text, I propose to think of the traumatised body as a living memorial. I suggest that it is the body in the materiality of its existence that constitutes itself as a memory of trauma through the suffering or discomfort of successive generations. In this sense, the traumatised body is a memorial body that needs to be preserved.