LE DON
La transmission du traumatisme
En français, traduit de l’anglais par JEAN-GUY MBOUDJEKE
L’Harmattan, Collection Graveurs de Mémoire
Dans Le Don, Irène Oore aborde le problème de la transmission du traumatisme d’une génération à l’autre. C’est un texte à voix multiples. Il y a la voix de Stefa, la mère de l’auteure, celle de l’auteure elle-même et enfin les voix de ses quatre enfants. Stefa est une jeune femme juive en Pologne durant l’Holocauste. Les années qu’elle passe à lutter pour sa survie la marquent à jamais. Elle ne peut s’empêcher de revenir sur les événements de cette période qu’elle raconte de façon obsessive. Au coeur de l’ouvrage se trouvent les questionnements de l’auteure : comment recevoir ce don douloureux et précieux de l’histoire ? Comment l’écouter ? Comment raconter cette histoire tragique faite de souffrances atroces et de courage extraordinaire ?
THE LISTENER
In the Shadow of the Holocaust
NYU Press
Amazon
McNallyRobinson
In The Listener, a daughter receives a troubling gift: her mother’s stories of surviving World War II in Poland. During the Holocaust, Irene Oore’s mother escaped the death camps by concealing her Jewish identity. Instead, those years found her constantly on the run and on the verge of starvation, living a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep herself and her family alive.
Throughout the book, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now, she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive.
ANALYSES:
(2021) E. Kella “Domestic Listening Across Generations: Irene Oore’s The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in Life Writing.
REVIEWS:
(2021) REVUE CMC REVIEW
(Dec 2019) THE COAST
(Sept 2019) WINNIPEGFREEPRESS
MEDIA
CBC RADIO INTERVIEW:
APPLE MUSIC PODCAST
CBC DOWNLOAD MP3
CBC ON DEMAND
CBC PODCAST
FRENCH RADIO SPECIAL & INTERVIEW (98.5FM Halifax):
LISTEN
NYU PRESS BLOG:
Transmuting Heartbreak—Listening to Our Past in 2020
TOURING PERFORMANCE-TALK:
Genocide and Improvisation: Listener and Teller.
Images
The creation of the following three paintings is described in the postlude of The Listener:
Golden Cave #1
Golden Cave #2
Golden Cave #3
Endorsements
Lyrical…Heartbreaking…Powerful.
As a child, Irene Oore longed for imaginative stories filled with fairies and magic. Instead what she got from her mother Stefa was a ‘strange lullaby’ filled with tales of starvation, humiliation, hatred, and genocide. Interwoven with Stefa’s story is the author’s own, revealing her contradictory feelings as a child of Holocaust survivors and as an unwilling, captive listener to her mother’s traumatic memories. No one in either story is heroic or always brave, but they are resilient and brutally honest about some of the most painful and disturbing things humanity has ever experienced or passed on to one’s children.
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman, author of The Kommandant’s Mistress and Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on the Holocaust
As Irene processes her mother’s memory of the Holocaust…never-ending nightmares come crashing into the present. Irene’s duty, as the second generation, to preserve those experiences drives this touching and compelling narrative.
Daniel Blatman, author of The Death Marches