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Trauma And Transmission: Echoes Of The Missing Past In Dora Bruder, Judith Greenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay begins with the ethical imperative that Dora Bruder puts forward: to pay attention to the stories of the pain of others that had been ignored during the Holocaust. But Dora Bruder is also full of "missing pieces"—missing details in Dora's life story, missing elements in the narrator's relationship with his father, and the missing understanding that necessarily occurs in relation to "knowing" trauma and particularly, the Holocaust. The essay looks at those "missing pieces" both through insights in trauma theory and through the lens of 9/11, which introduced a new sense of the "missing" to this writer. It …