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The problem with mapping distress in the mind of the individual is that such a cartography tends to overlook the fact that the causes, locus, and consequences of collective violence are predominantly social. —Arthur Kleinman (1995b, 181–82) I believe that most Jews, even the most assimilated, walk around with a subliminal fear of anti-Semitism the way most women walk around with a subliminal fear of rape. —Evelyn T. Beck (1991, 22) The serial self-representational practices of two Canadian immigrant women autobiographers, and the insights their narratives offer into the vicissitudes of self-construction in the face of social trauma located at the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity/religion, are the focus of this essay. In 1972, Fredelle Bruser Maynard published Raisins and Almonds, an account— she would belatedly acknowledge—of “the anguish, the deep sense of exclusion” (1989, 133) she experienced “growing up Jewish and alien” in the small towns of western Canada during the 1920s and 1930s (1985, xix).1 It was followed in 1989 by The Tree of Life, a volume focused on her adult life and introduced as “tougher … [and] truer” than the earlier memoir (xxi). Elly Danica’s 1988 incest narrative, Don’t: A Woman’s Word, also set in western Canada and speaking (however obliquely) to the immigrant experience, is a text composed of numbered fragments that opens with the abused child’s crushing pain and closes with the adult survivor’s defiant “I am” (94). It was followed in 1996 by Beyond Don’t: Dreaming Past the Dark. In each case, I want to suggest, the second volume does more than 227 bina toledo freiwald Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography Healing and Beyond take up where the earlier one had left off, and the return to (and of) the past is governed by a logic that partakes of (but also exceeds) a traumatic wound that is “not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly” (Caruth 1996, 4). In each case, the first autobiographical foray—the first attempt to work through trauma—both succeeds and fails, preparing the way for its sequel. The autobiographers themselves tell us the measure of their success. Raisins and Almonds had its genesis, Maynard explains, in “a small painful experience of anti-Semitism” that triggered “a flood of memories … [releasing ] sorrows long held in check” (1989, xx–xxi). The incident, retold three times over the course of the two volumes, captures Maynard’s experience of abjection as both a woman and a Jew. The incident occurs during a work trip to Atlantic City where Maynard—a prize-winning PhD graduate married to a non-Jew and living a thoroughly assimilated life in a New England university town—has to grade college entrance examinations (work she was able to get, ironically, on the recommendation of a former student), having lost her university teaching position when she became pregnant with her first child. The crushing moment comes when a fellow examiner reports to her what he thinks is an amusing conversation he overheard between two college board officials discussing minority-group pressures for representation: “‘Well,’ said No. 1, ‘we’ve got our token black.’ ‘Oh?’ said No. 2, ‘Who?’ ‘Fredelle Maynard,’ said No. 1. And No. 2 said, ‘Fredelle Maynard’s not our black. She’s our Jew’” (1989, 133). The incident leads to a “volcanic eruption” of feeling for Maynard (1985, ix) and the writing of Raisins and Almonds, a book that she recognizes in retrospect fundamentally changed her life: “I realized, after long confusion, who I was and wanted to be” (ix). Shortly after its publication in 1985, her marriage of twenty-five years to (the gentile) Max Maynard ends, and the self-questioning provoked by the autobiographical project culminates in the recognition that “my essential nature … was intimately involved with my Jewishness” (1989, xvii). Danica, too, describes the writing of the first volume of her autobiography as an enabling process of self-recovery, a re-membering of a self shattered by her father’s abuse of her from the age of four until she left his house (never a home) at eighteen: “the daily writing was where and how I worked towards a re-integration of the aspects of Self which had been fragmented” (qtd. in Williamson 1993, 80–81). Although not Jewish , Danica also experienced rejection and marginalization as a non-English -speaking immigrant. Here, however, I am primarily interested in the comparability of the trauma she experienced as a woman (incest...

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