Moderator: Dorota Glowacka

Presenters:

Isabel Cout

Christopher Elson

Victoria Aarons

Leanne Lieberman

Dr. Christopher Elson (professor of French at Dalhousie) and Isabel Cout (Teacher and Graduate student) are a team of co-translators who have proposed a panel discussion that will be a continuation of reflections on their current work translating the novels of young Franco-Argentinian novelist Frédérika Amalia Finkelstein. Finkelstein’s first novel in particular, Forgetting (to be published in English translation by Deep Vellum press in Fall 2022), is striking in its engagement with the Shoah, taking up the activities of memory and memorialization from a radically unconventional third-generation perspective. Finkelstein shocks her readers when her character expresses sentiments that have become deeply taboo. On the very first page of Forgetting—which is dedicated to her grandfather, himself a survivor—she writes: “I say this without shame: I want to forget, to annihilate that vile Shoah from my memory, and to extract it from my brain like a tumor. I want the abyss of History to swallow it forever.” Elson and Cout propose to situate Finkelstein within a growing conversation about expressions of ambivalent or heterodox relationships to intergenerational traumatic memory that seek to unseat, or at the very least, to complicate the dominant narrative with regards to the work of remembering or carrying difficult history.

Cout and Elson will be accompanied by Dr. Victoria Aarons and Leanne Liberman.

Leanne Lieberman is the author of five young adult novels, including The Most Dangerous Thing, Gravity (Sydney Taylor Notable), The Book of Treesand Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust (Sydney Taylor Notable and Bank Street Best Book). Her adult fiction has been published in New Quarterly, Descant, Fireweed, The Antigonish Review and Grain. Leanne lives and teaches in Kingston, Ontario. 

Victoria Aarons holds the position of O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor ofLiterature in the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teachescourses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to numerous articles and bookchapters, she is the author or editor of 11 books, including A Measure of Memory: Storytellingand Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing theCovenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of the Choice Award for OutstandingAcademic Title; The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction; TheCambridge Companion to Saul Bellow; Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory inMemoir and Fiction; The New Jewish American Literary Studies; Holocaust Graphic Narratives:Generation, Trauma, and Memory; and The Palgrave Handbook on Holocaust Literature andCulture. Her forthcoming monograph, Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’sGraphic Narratives will appear this spring (Rutgers UP, 2023). Aarons serves as judge for theEdward Lewis Wallant Award, a literary prize given each year to a rising American Jewishwriter of fiction. She is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American JewishLiterature, and Women in Judaism, and she is series editor for Lexington Studies in JewishLiterature. She is currently editing a book on Jewish women’s graphic novels and memoirs.

Image: Book Cover Forgetting by Frederika Amallia Finkelstein.