Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives

"Ja, Das ist der Plaz" ["Yes, this is the place"]—Simon Strebnik, the survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, identifies, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,¹ a site of innocent "nothing," covering up and silencing an act of annihilation, an act of eradication. A site of absence like this, where you see nothing because you see "nothing," a place that arrests a time of disappearing, of vanishing into nothing, is what I would tentatively call a "negative" chronotope.

And "Yes, of course she recognizes it. Why shouldn't she? That was their last ghetto" (135).² Yes, this is the place the nameless survivor in Ida Fink's story "Traces" identifies in an old photograph as "their last ghetto," reduced "in the last stage . . . to this one little" snow covered "street" (136). There are traces of footsteps in the snow in the foreground. Reduced, voided, silenced and covered up, the place stores the time of extinction. The woman, and the reader, are made to look into a void, into a "non-transcendent emptiness," an emptiness that is not a spiritually charged, capitalized "Nothingness," nor a nothing that encapsulates the Human Condition. Neither does it indicate an endless speculation of a deadly serious language-game. It is simply empty. This empty place is an ambivalent space that is and is not itself. It is that "nothing" that has not "been able to fill, or even cover over, the gaping pit."³ It marks its radical difference from its own past. It is a trace of itself. Here, again, is a "negative" chronotope. In this case too, it structures a narrative that attempts to capture the moment of disappearance in a place charged with "not," a place under erasure (cf. Baer 20, 23).

One could choose from a vast number of terms for that which was and is no more, to distinguish it from that which has never been. The concepts negating presence, from absence to disappearance, from emptiness to void and nothingness, have a long history of philosophical and theological discourse behind them, from the Fathers of the Church to Sartre and Heidegger.⁴ Yet the experience of Simon Strebnik and the survivor of "Traces" resists conceptualization. Made to confront and identify the deceptive, self negating empty stage of the theater of death, they can only look, perceive, and assert its placeness. They can only see the spatial materiality of an index with an abyss at its center; a setting delineating an excruciatingly long but fleeting moment of dying.

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This collection of essays is about narrative as a way of thinking. Trauma, by expert definition, is anything but a way of thinking. However, for narrators and characters, as well as for readers and writers, narrative is not merely a way of thinking—it may be a way of perceiving, of remembering, and perhaps, above all, of (re)experiencing living and dying. For writers, it may be a way of surviving, even; for some "surviving" writers—a way of speaking the truth of an experience of "not being," of becoming "nothing." For apart from the many psychological needs to narrate, apart from the inner urgency to shape experience for whatever reason or purpose, some writers have expressed their conviction that fictional narrative is the only way through which the truth of an ineffable "negative" reality, which otherwise eludes comprehension, may be apprehended and transmitted. Fiction, for them, becomes reliable testimony. At least, this is what Jorge Semprún felt when writing of his experience in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in the form of a fictional autobiography: "Only the artifice of a masterly narrative will prove capable of conveying the truth of the testimony . . . would help reality to seem real, and truth to be believable" (Suleiman 4).

Like Semprún in his autobiographical texts, Ida Fink, the Israeli-Polish writer, aspires in her stories to convince us of the reality of the inconceivable, and to "narrow the fissure between the truth of experience and its literary representation" (Wilczinski 27). Even if fictional, it is all real: "Everything...