Suchergebnisse

Life stories such as memoirs reflect the interplay of autobiographical reasoning, and collective remembrance at a time and in a place where memoirs are written. Using this perspective for understanding life-writing, I discuss memoirs written by two women who were formerly internees in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olga Lengyel (1909–2001) lost her entire family in the camp and wrote her memoir in Paris just after the war. Her account describes the atrocities that she observed with few reflections on her own experiences. Mira Ryczke Kimmelman, (1923–) wrote her memoir more than half a century later as an emigre to the United States after the war where she and her husband raised their children and where she is presently an active participant in the survivor community. Her memoir is written as what Tomkins and McAdams have portrayed as a characteristic American redemptive account of successfully overcoming adversity. Following a happy childhood and suffering through the Shoah, Mira Kimmelman is a generative mentor who lectures on her experiences and leads tours for young people back to her homeland. She is concerned that the next generation be spared the suffering of the Shoah.

Them Days magazine is a quarterly publication that has been dedicated to preserving the history and culture of Labrador for the past 42 years. It is created in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, in the mainland portion of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. This article outlines a methodology of faithful feminist witnessing that is used to engage the Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories contained in Them Days and the story of Them Days itself. This methodology utilizes decolonizing, postcolonial, and feminist life-writing theories, and is guided by decolonial attitude, which the author argues is demonstrated in the magazine's founding principles and continuing work.

This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature. I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity. In their representation of life at home we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors' textual autobiographical subjectivity. I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators' commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas.