Crossing the Frontiers of Death: A Journey Through War Memories and Continents in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the journey of a Holocaust survivor from Poland to Canada via Greece in Anne Michaels’ famous novel Fugitive pieces published in Canada in 1996. The voyage becomes a multilayered quest through war memories of the main protagonist, a seven year old Jakob Beer who has to overcome the specters of the war such as witnessing his parents’ death and vanishing of his sister. Not only is the book a discussion on how to deal with the haunting ghosts of the past but it also transforms into a poetical treatise on the burden the Holocaust survivors carry and the possibilities of liberating oneself from it. The analysis of the novel is intertwined with the recent theoretical studies on memory and its value in shaping one’s personality and identity. Therefore, Marianne Hirsch’s book on post memory titled Family frames. Photography narrative and post memory (2002) and Anne Whitehead’s Memory (Routledge, London, 2009), for instance, serve as tools to render Jakob Beer’s identity comprised to a large extent his memories of pre- and post-Holocaust childhood. The influence of the trauma of the war extermination is tremendous and it has an impact on all spheres of Jakob’s life, even as an adult. As a result of that the article will address the issue of capability of crossing the frontiers of death and starting a peaceful life, devoid of these ghosts in a different country or even possibly on a different continent.