Articles

Writing under the 'Auto/biographical Demand' in Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox (2012) and Exodus (2015)

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.14.42450

Keywords:

auto/biographical demand, transgenerational transmission, third generation, Holocaust in Hungary

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Deborah Feldman’s memoir sequel, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012) and Exodus: A Memoir (2015), through the lens of what Leigh Gilmore calls 'the auto/biographical demand'. It argues that Feldman writes under the 'auto/biographical demand' as the grandchild of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and redeploys the inherited story of gendered suffering during the Holocaust in order to reconfigure her own Jewish American identity. I employ Gilmore’s concept to reflect upon the writing of the self in Feldman’s memoir sequel in terms of narrative entanglement, postmemory, and third generation transmission of collective trauma. In addition, the article reflects on Feldman’s text as an echo chamber of the profoundly controversial Kastner affair during the Holocaust in Hungary and its transatlantic reverberations.

Author Biography

Szidonia Haragos, ShanghaiTech University

Szidonia Haragos (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5761-487X) is Visiting Associate Professor of English at ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China. She focuses on transnational narratives of migration and diaspora, gendered narratives of trauma and survival, and the material, cinematic and literary representations of the post-traumatic gendered self. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development; A/b: Auto/Biography Studies; Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly; Life Writing; Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies; Studies in European Cinema, and is forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is currently working on her manuscript entitled Realignments: Transnational Anglophone Memoirs by Women.

Published

2025-01-23

Issue

Vol. 14 (2025): EJLW

Section

Articles

Copyright (c) 2025 Szidonia Haragos

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