Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu (review)

This thematic edited collection features contributions by seventeen women authors from different countries, most of them with personal backgrounds in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Simona Mitroiu, known for her earlier research on memory and life writing, it presents a welcome addition to the growing fields of life writing, memory studies, and population displacement. What makes this volume special is that it focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, which is still underrepresented in the three fields mentioned above. It may be compared to similar scholarship by Vieda Skultans, Simeon Vilensky, Veronica Shapovalov, Tiina Kirss, Dalia Leinarte, Gabriele Ripple et al., Violeta Davoliūtė et al., and others that have focused on various cases of population displacement in Eastern Europe through the lens of life writing.

For the contributors to the volume, Central and Eastern Europe is a political rather than a geographic designation and encompasses the space of Europe dominated by communist regimes. This space is broadly understood as postsocialist and postcolonial. However, as often happens with volumes carrying such broad geographic titles, only some Eastern European countries (mostly southeastern) are covered.

The volume's thematic focus is on the role of women's narratives of displacement and their place in public memories. In their explorations of the life writing of different women, the authors are asking how these women dealt with the traumatic memory of WWII; how their memories were transmitted on individual and collective levels; and why they occupy such a marginal place in the collective memories of Central and Eastern European countries. These are broad questions that tie together a history of population displacement and women's and memory studies. The contributors should be applauded for their ambition to cross the disciplinary boundaries of these academic fields. The focus here will be on the chapters that, in my view, offer new methodological insights on how to study women's displacement in general.

The key concept that reverberates throughout all the chapters is postmemory. As defined by Marianne Hirsch, postmemory "describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that 'they remember' only as the narratives or images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful … as to constitute memories of their own right" (16). Throughout the volume the authors put Hirsch's theory of postmemory into practice, and indeed, they do it quite consistently and creatively.

Mitroiu's introduction sets a firm theoretical agenda for the whole volume by placing an emphasis on offering a comprehensive perspective on women's untold stories of displacement and the mechanisms of their memory mediation. It sets up a historical context of post-totalitarian Central and Eastern European societies, where socialist regimes heavily interfered in the private lives of women and their families. The introduction also provides a brief and useful overview of major population displacements in Central and Eastern Europe, though it contains some stylistic and factual oddities, such as the "massacre of … Balkans" and "the German expulsion" that happened in "almost all of Europe" (14).

The eleven chapters are divided into three thematic sections: on generations and narratives of postmemory, sites of postmemory and history, and postmemory. This division is useful because it helps to shift readers' attention from generational to spatial and temporal aspects of postmemory's transmission. In essence, the book offers three key arguments: postmemory is important because it creates identities; it is transmitted in various ways and uses diverse textual resources in cultural space; and postmemory is always gendered. The last point is especially significant because it addresses a theme barely examined in the academic literature—not only the physical displacement of Central and Eastern European women, but also the displacement of their traumatic memories from socialist and postsocialist societies.

In Chapter 3, Sasha Colby makes the point that Hirsch's theory of postmemory...