Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 Writing a Whole Life : Maria Lewitt's Holocaust/Migration Narratives in 'Multicultural' Australia
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures. [Author's abstract]

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    y separately published work icon Life Writing Displaced Women : Eastern European Post-War Narratives in Australia vol. 11 no. 4 October Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams (editor), 2014 8040575 2014 periodical issue 2014 pg. 391-410
Last amended 6 Nov 2014 14:33:08
391-410 Writing a Whole Life : Maria Lewitt's Holocaust/Migration Narratives in 'Multicultural' Australiasmall AustLit logo Life Writing
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