(Re)Claiming Motherhood in the Wake of the Holocaust in Chava Rosenfarb’s ‘Little Red Bird’ and Valentine Goby’s Kinderzimmer

ABSTRACT

While saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• Holocaust
• Valentine Goby
• Chava Rosenfarb
• gender
• Ravensbrück

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Nathalie Ségeral is a Lecturer in French studies at The University of Sydney (Australia). She was an assistant professor of French at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa (USA) from 2013 to 2019 and received a Ph.D. from UCLA in 2012. Her research, teaching and publications revolve around issues of gender, trauma, motherhood, childlessness, and (post)memory in narratives of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, as well as in contemporary France and the Francophone South Pacific. Her French translation of David Chappell's Le Réveil kanak: la montée du nationalisme en Nouvelle-Calédonie was recently published by the New Caledonia University Press, and her latest articles have appeared in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Crossways Journal, Jewish Culture and History and Women in French Studies.

ORCID

Nathalie Ségeral http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0433-5292

Notes

1 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. Bessie K.’s complete testimony can be found at the Yale Fortunoff Archive Tape A67.

2 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015 [1992]), p. 194.

3 Irène Omélianenko and François Teste, “Collection particulière: des femmes et des bébés à Ravensbrück.” France Culture, January 29, 2015, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/sur-les-docks-14-15/collection-particuliere-des-femmes-et-des-bebes-ravensbruck.

4 This term was coined by Alain Buisine in “Biofictions,” Revue des sciences humaines, vol. 224 (1991): pp. 7–13.

5 Carol Rittner and John Roth, Women and the Holocaust: Different Voices (New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 70.

6 Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), p. 90: “And yet, the body in extremis – the body experiencing itself acutely as a body – is a human reality to which mothers cannot help but have access, although once again they are expected to put a lid on it.”

7 Rose, Mothers, p. 10.

8 David Rousset coined the term “concentrationary” in his essay L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1989 [1946]).

9 “Victimology” is a term that was coined in 1947 by Benjamin Mendelsohn and has now become an academic discipline which studies data relating to victimization. According to the Oxford dictionary, victimology is also “a mental attitude which tends to indulge and perpetuate the feeling of being a victim.”

10 Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1991).

11 Ibid., p. 37.

12 See, for instance, Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) or Carol Rittner and John Roth, Women and the Holocaust: Different Voices (New York: Paragon House, 1993), to name just a few.

13 Joan Ringelheim, “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 344–5.

14 Marianne Hirsch, “Mothers and Daughters,” Signs, vol. 7, no. 1 (1981): pp. 200–222, p. 200.

15 See, for instance, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (NY: Orion Press, 1959) or Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [1946]).

16 Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015).

17 Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück and Giuliana Tedeschi, There is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

18 Omélianenko and Teste, “Collection particulière.”

19 Ibid. Excerpts from Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe and Madeleine Roubenne’s interviews from the Institut National des Archives, 1st April 1965. See also: Amicale de Ravensbrück et association des déportées et internées de la Résistance, Les Françaises à Ravensbrück (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) and Madeleine Aylmer-Roubenne, J’ai donné la vie dans un camp de la mort (Paris: J’ai lu, 1999).

20 Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001), p. 18: “Wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male of the species. And fascism is a decidedly male property, whether you were for or against it. Besides, women have no past, or aren’t supposed to have one. A man can have an interesting past, a woman only an indecent one. And my stories aren’t even sexy.”

21 Ibid., p. 71.

22 Ibid., p. 119.

23 Ibid., p. 119.

24 “I loved Theresienstadt, for the nineteen or twenty months which I spent there made me into a social animal. In Vienna I suffered from neurotic compulsions and had tics; in Theresienstadt I overcame my obsessions by means of human contacts, friendships, conversations.” Ibid., 86.

25 Valentine Goby, Kinderzimmer (Paris: Actes Sud, 2013), p. 62. My emphasis. This and all subsequent English translations from Goby’s untranslated novel are my own.

26 Ibid., p. 63.

27 Ibid., p. 15.

28 Ibid., p. 23.

29 Ibid., p. 34.

30 Ibid., p. 24.

31 For a description of the dehumanization at work in Nazi death camps, see, for example, Robert Antelme, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après (Paris: Minuit, 1971), or Amicale de Ravensbrück et association des déportées et internées de la Résistance.

32 Ibid., p. 59.

33 Lawrence Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 351–63, p. 357.

34 Ibid., p. 59.

35 Ibid., p. 90.

36 Ibid., p. 21.

37 Ibid., p. 21.

38 Rose, Mothers, p. 78.

39 My emphasis. Goby, Kinderzimmer, p. 95.

40 Ibid., p. 131.

41 Ibid., p. 166.

42 Ibid., p. 99.

43 Ibid., p. 209.

44 Ibid., p. 105.

45 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 3.

46 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

47 Chava Rosenfarb, “Little Red Bird,” in Survivors (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004), p. 172.

48 Ibid., p. 169.

49 Ibid., p. 172.

50 My emphasis.

51 Rosenfarb, “Little Red Bird,” p. 171.

52 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 182.

53 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin Psychology, 1991 [1976]), p. 27

54 Rosenfarb, “Little Red Bird,” p. 165.

55 Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, p. 21.

56 My emphases. It is noteworthy that Klüger casts her own mother as Snow White’s stepmother, in that again it emphasizes the disruption and destruction of traditional family relationships brought about by the irruption of the Holocaust trauma and concentrationary experience.

57 Rosenfarb, “Little Red Bird,” p. 165.

58 Ibid., p. 167. My emphasis.

59 Ibid., pp. 171–2.

60 Ibid., p. 172.

61 Ibid., p. 168.

62 Ibid., p. 182. My emphasis.

63 Ibid., p. 176.

64 Ibid., p. 183.

65 Marianne Hirsch, “Mothers and Daughters,” p. 202.

66 Ibid., p. 200.

67 Ibid., p. 202.

68 See, for instance, Cécile Wajsbrot’s autobiographical narratives: Le Tour du lac (2004), Beaune-la-Rolande (2004), Mémorial (Paris: Zulma, 2005), and L’Hydre de Lerne (Paris: Zulma, 2011), as well as Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Paris: Galilée, 1994), an autobiography of her time as a hidden child in Paris during France’s Occupation.

69 See, for instance, Cécile Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (Paris: Zuma, 2005) and L’Hydre de Lerne (Paris: Zulma, 2011).

70 Jane Sautière, Nullipare (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

71 Marceline Loridan-Ivens, (with Judith Perrignon), L’Amour après (Paris: Grasset, 2018).

72 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 158–9.

73 Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

74 Goby, Kinderzimmer, p. 17.

75 Interview with Sylvie Aylmer. Journal du Dimanche, November 3, 2013. https://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Une-enfant-rescapee-du-camp-de-Ravensbrueck-temoigne-Avec-maman-nous-n-en-parlions-pas-636890.

Additional information

Funding

University of Hawaii Office of Vice-Chancellor for Research Travel Award: a $2000 award that covered my expenses to present this paper at the conference ‘The Holocaust and Motherhood’ organized by Helena Duffy at the Wiener Library in London on 22–23 March 2018. Mellon Fellowship on Holocaust Studies in American and World Cultures, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, that helped me conduct preliminary research for this paper in Summers 2009 and 2010 by spending two months in Berlin.