From Budapest to Montreal
Intergenerational Interlacing in Kalman-Naves’ Shoshanna’s Story: A Mother, a Daughter and the Shadows of History
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rst.21475Keywords:
Holocaust, survival, intergenerational, motherhood, Elaine Kalman NavesAbstract
Shoshanna’s Story: A Mother, a Daughter and the Shadows of History, is Elaine Kalman Naves’ autobiobiographical novel, told from the point of view of a child. It tells the story of her mother Shoshanna, a survivor of the camps, and recounts Naves’ childhood in Budapest in the aftermath of war and the arrival of the family in Montreal in 1959. An intergenerational link is made through events unfolding between cities, eras, and languages. The narrative interweaves past and present, Europe, and the New World, the dead, and the living. The birth of the girl, Naves, born after the war arouses joy mixed with sadness. The baby is dressed in clothes that belonged
to murdered children. Like the layers of strudel dough made by Shoshanna, and the swaddles enveloping the little girl’s buttocks, the generations overlap, dynamically metaphorizing the temporal and spatial layers and restoring their reality to the victims of history.
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