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1 Elective 3: History and Memory Elective 3: History and Memory Explore the Explore the relationships relationships between individual memory and between individual memory and documented events. documented events. Consider the Consider the interplay interplay of personal experience, memory and of personal experience, memory and documented evidence to broaden your understanding of how history documented evidence to broaden your understanding of how history is shaped and is shaped and represented. represented. Analyse Analyse the ways in which the the ways in which the elements intertwine elements intertwine in complex and in complex and often contradicting patterns to shape history. often contradicting patterns to shape history. The meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usually The meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usually taken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts become taken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts become difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred. difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred.

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NSW HSC 2014 Adv English Module C

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Elective 3: History and MemoryElective 3: History and Memory

Explore the Explore the relationshipsrelationships between individual memory and between individual memory and documented events.documented events.

Consider the Consider the interplayinterplay of personal experience, memory and of personal experience, memory and documented evidence to broaden your understanding of how history documented evidence to broaden your understanding of how history is shaped and is shaped and represented.represented.

AnalyseAnalyse the ways in which the the ways in which the elements intertwineelements intertwine in complex and in complex and often contradicting patterns to shape history.often contradicting patterns to shape history.

The meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usually The meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usually taken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts become taken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts become difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred.difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred.

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IntroductionHistorya discourse of documented events both written and oral.A scholarly discipline that claims to record the truth of

past events.Memory is the faculty by which events are recalled or kept in the

mind.History is often used to validate memory however as

explored by Baker, both history and memory have limitations as well as being able to be explored through the use of different mediums

Individual and collective memories, as well as historical evidence and fictional recreation based in history and memories are used in the text to recreate and understand the past

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OverviewThe novel is essentially a biography of Baker's parents

narrated by its author, Mark Baker. In Jewish mysticism, it is believed that there are 49 gates

that separate good from evil. They are gates in our hearts. Beyond them, lies a fiftieth gate, the point at which we stop moving but become aware of who we are. It is the gate we pass through when we say 'I am'. – The Fiftieth Gate http://www.yashanet.com/studies/revstudy/fifty-gates.htm

Its sequential form is insistently landmarked by the device of the numbered gates. The opening gate suggests the confusion & loss of darkness & ignorance ‘Nothing. I don’t recognise a thing. Why did you drag me here?’ but we are promised a journey to an end point – the 50th gate.

As its subtitle, 'A Journey through Memory' suggests, the book is comprised of reminiscences from his parents about their lives and experiences during the 1930s and 1940s.

Baker, a Melbourne academic, supplements their stories with material from his own research into the period to paint a more complete picture of his parents' lives.

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Overview (continued…) Its sequential form is insistently landmarked by the device of the

numbered gates. The opening gate suggests the confusion & loss of darkness & ignorance ‘Nothing. I don’t recognise a thing. Why did you drag me here?’ but we are promised a journey to an end point – the 50th gate.

Ironically though, The work resists all sequencing. The memories are fragmented and despite his attempts at some kind of order, there can be no purely logical order of events as the past emerges from the present rather than the other way around.

Baker frequently reflects the heavy accents of his parents in his spelling, which forges a stronger bond between the reader and two elderly Jews reliving their horrific Holocaust experiences.

The author is involved with and affected by the project at every stage so that there appears to be no authorial distance between Baker and the material he records.

Baker includes documents from his research in the book, as well as reconstructions of events, records of his parents speaking about their memories on tape and records of his conversations with them.

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The Plot

A very personal storyA journey for the author through the experiences

of his parents during the Holocaust.Baker has researched the events surrounding

the persecution of the Jews in the areas of Poland in which his parents grew up, and from which they were removed during WWII.

His father, Yossl, was imprisoned in some of the most notorious concentration camps

His mother, Genia, was forced to hide for several years once the Jews of her village had been murdered.

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The Plot (continued…)

The relationship between Baker and his parents becomes strained at some points during Baker's probing of the past.

When the family revisits the villages and death camps familiar to his parents, the emotional pressure for Genia and Yossl becomes intense.

The author's parents were born before the war in small towns where the majority of the population was Jewish. Yossl Baker (previously Bekiermaszyn) lived in Wierzbnik with his family, and Genia Baker (previously Bekiermaszyn) lived in Bursztyn with her own family.

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The Plot (continued…)During 1942, both towns were occupied by German forces.

Yossl and his future wife Genia were forced to move; Yossl to various labour and death camps (Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Birkenau) Genia into hiding.

It is this time period, during which his father was incarcerated and his mother was on the run, in which Mark Baker was most interested. His father was captured and taken first to Auschwitz then Buchenwald before his liberation in 1945.

His mother hid with her parents in forests and in small towns wherever possible. Their stories are different in terms of the horror they both had to endure, yet there is no mistaking that both were left with powerful memories which the author began to unlock when he journeyed into their pasts.

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Baker’s Parents

Genia KrochmalBaker's mother, born in Bolszowce, Galician Poland, 1934 & was the only child to survive the deportation of 1,380 Jews to Belzec in Oct 1942. Survived for 2 years, hiding in blackness in a bunker in a nearby village.History does not validate her memory. Baker's search for archival signs of her former existence in Bolszowce prove redundant & force him to dispense with the historian’s truth & rely on his mother's memory as the evidence & hence justification for her pain:

"[I]t was not the facts that were held under suspicion, but her credibility as a survivor. Unlike my father, she could never show her

children the scars on her arm; hers were invisible, numbered in the days & years of

her stolen childhood”

Yossl BekiermaszynBaker's father, from Wierzbnik, southeast of Warsaw.The Nazis' murder of his two younger sisters, Martale & Yentale, & the missing history of his father, Lieb Bekiermaszyn, weight his story.Baker returns with his father to one address from his past: Buchenwald. There he is able to depend on history, since he can quote his father's incarceration & so validate his experiences:

"My father is on pages 42 & 109 of a Register of Jewish Survivors published by the Jewish Agency of Palestine in 1945 …

He is listed as Josek Bekiermaszyn, officially arrested by SS on 28 October 1942, after

which he was imprisoned in Starachowice, Auschwitz & Buchenwald.“

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Issues and Themes

The power of traumatic experience in shaping a person's life.

The experiences of Jewish refugees in Australia after the Second World War

The struggle of the children of Holocaust survivors to understand, respect and move on from their parents' experiences.

The cultural life of Jewish Australians. The effect of the Holocaust on Jewish thought, culture and

communityThe role of memory and remembrance

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The Narrative Style

The Fiftieth Gate reshapes the genre of conventional memoir writing

The book is divided into 50 chapters, each symbolizing a gate on the path to a religious revelation, the triumph of good over evil.

Vignettes of memory are juxtaposed in the context of the present-tense journey of Baker's investigation of archives, the acquisition of historical details, & a self-reflexive analysis of the right to occupy his parents' pasts as a historian and son.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)

While spirited by the historical weight & empiricism of archival evidence, Baker surrenders to his mother's memories of unspeakable darkness:

- her story of a young girl denied the right to be one, - her dual roles as Holocaust survivor and mother, - permitting her to speak without qualification,

- and he is almost ashamed for having required the initial documentation of history.

The details of the physical return to Poland—as the source of both wound and revelation—recalls the methods of writing the detective genre: the burial of evidence & its rediscovery, the travel from archive to archive, with documents in hand, desperate to corroborate his parent's memories forged in the addresses of Birkenau, Bolszowce, and Buchenwald.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the

Archive, an examination of survivor testimony, Giorgio Agamben remarked that the vocation of the survivor is to remember.

The Fiftieth Gate is a vivid incarnation of that particularly Jewish vocation of the storyteller and the commandment of Zakhor ie "Remember in the heart, do not forget…That you should say it with your mouth”

We watch Baker inhabit the roles of the vicarious witness—the teenage son, historian, writer, heir & embodiment of this vocation.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)The narrative content of Baker's reconstruction of the

everyday journey of the intimate, physical & empirical topography of Genia's & Yossl's persecution, incarceration, survival & postwar refuge reveals not simply a son in search of knowing his parents but also his own Australian-Jewish identity that is anchored to an incomplete present.

The responsibility to write the story of that identity, the text of his memory of their shared history, is reflected in Baker's monumental gift to his parents, which is, finally, to enter into the fiftieth gate, in which memory has survived the attempt to destroy it & where blackness is overwhelmed by light.

—Simone Gigliotti at http://www.novelguide.com

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RepresentationThe Fiftieth Gate is written in an abstract manner:-Poems/song lyrics/prayers

p14,71,93,191,203,227,243,249,261,276,314,Official documents including:

-archives (p40) and certificates (p31,126), -lists (p116) and indexes (p294ff),-tombstones (p245),-geog. dictionaries (p54),-school reports (p63,67,306), other reports

(p76,131,149ff),-letters (p79,118,238,303ff,) and written

testimonies (p156ff,178ff,214)

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Representation (continued…)Old tales (p61,174) General narrative, tying it all together like the

Talmud where a passage of law is placed in the centre of the page &

different interpretations are

written around it so

that each page is a

discussion among

scholars across the

centuries.

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Representation (continued…)

Like the Talmud, The Fiftieth Gate is polyphonous, made up of fragments & self reflective.

It is innovative in form & approach and explicitly intertextual. As such, it is essentially a postmodern text.

The author uses interesting techniques to narrate the story of his parents' survival:-

-Italicized writing to relay points his parents have told him of in the past (“talking-head on video”)

-Non-italicized writing to relay what his parent are telling him at the moment of his narrative.

However, the story does not read as if penned from a meticulous and calculating historic hand.

Instead, it is touched with descriptions of such elegance that the language could almost be taken from a piece of fiction.

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Representation (continued…) It’s obvious, from the type of history that the book tries to

cover, that most topics & memories will be dark. We know the Holocaust was a bleak, savage event. Baker tries to convey how it has affected his parents in their memories & thoughts.

Their memories are hidden away in the past & confused. Perhaps the inability to remember is due to the large lapse of time between the "now" & the "then.“

The inaccuracies are also possibly due to burdened minds trying to live again, away from the blackness of their early life. Whatever the reason, the lapses in memory posed a problem for Baker.

He couldn’t simply accept the "facts" his parents gave him, instead he needed to investigate the lives of which they claimed.

This was the biggest problem of history the author faced while writing this book; the accuracy of memories gathered.

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Representation (continued…)So what we have in The Fiftieth Gate is a

confluence of different representations –

personal stories (memory) and public stories (history). In neither case are we dealing with the material, yet, each story makes its claim on reality.

The idea of history as unfinished narratives is captured here and reiterated towards the end of his book on (P.302) ‘In the end, the beginning’.