A Couch Story, Sort of: Narrative Slippage and Archival Memory in Pearl Gluck’s Divan

This essay locates Pearl Gluck’s recent documentary in the context of Pierre Nora’s argument concerning memory, history, and the archive: namely, in modernity, the burden to remember is transferred from individuals or communities to the archive, which indiscriminately and compulsively records. “A Couch Story” offers a detailed reading of the documentary itself, introducing new sets of terms and playing with the distinctions between “reproduction” and “evolution” as a binary that Gluck initially establishes but then progressively complicates by both refusing her Hasidic community’s pressure to reproduce itself in her and through her and simultaneously collecting Hasidic stories in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the essay argues that while Gluck’s marginal position seemingly allows for the archival obsession of Nora’s modern memory, Gluck’s archive is not a collection that remembers, but is rather a perpetual retelling. Gluck’s narrative concurrently preserves and disrupts her ties to her family, her community, and the Holocaust, locating the memory of catastrophe through its relation to the slippage of the archive.