Abstract
Alana M. Vincent’s Making Memory is ‘a book about living with the past … about the negotiation, implicit or explicit, between what is remembered … and what is forgotten’ (p. 1). Preferring the literary and artistic to overtly theological analysis, Vincent focuses on ‘a sample of memorial sites and texts through which the boundaries between living (individual) memory, cultural memory, and history are constantly being re-negotiated’ (p. 6). The vignettes Vincent chooses may, at first, seem puzzling. What does Parshat Zakhor (Deuteronomy 25.17–19) have to do with Antigone, or a First World War memorial? What does Anne of Green Gables have to do with a Holocaust museum?
Yet, by weaving together – less like a tapestry than a patchwork quilt – these moments of memorialization, Vincent depicts the way communities of rememberers transform real events in the past into stories that generate meaning in the present. In the first chapter of the book, she interprets the paradoxical commandment in Parshat Zakhor (Deuteronomy 25.17–19) as an example of Jewish communal memory-making. To remember to forget Amalek is ‘to move the past from the realm of history into the realm of memory, by forging an active connection to the individuals who encounter it’ (p. 30), to continue to feel the effects of the past in the present.
In the second chapter on Antigone, Vincent analyses both Sophocles’ version and a more recent rendition written by Jean Anouilh during Nazi-occupied France. Tensions again arise between remembering and forgetting: while Polynices’ corpse plays a central role in Sophocles’ Antigone, Vincent observes that in Anouilh’s version, it is forgotten. This remembering apart from bodies becomes a central theme for the rest of the book beginning in the next chapter on the Anne of Green Gables series. Vincent treats the novels as evidence of the changing process of memorialization that occurred when the First World War created the necessity of mourning absent the bodies of the dead. Increasingly, Vincent argues, names replace bodies as evidenced in the Canadian Vimy Memorial, where the faces of the sculptural figures ‘cannot encompass the memory of all lost faces’ (p. 102), but where each name carved into the walls of the memorial ‘embodies the individuality of the life it represents’ (p. 109).
Finally, Vincent addresses the difficulties with memorializing the Holocaust, exemplified by the Room of Names in the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where there is an ‘absence of not only body and gravesite’, but also ‘the normal community of mourners’ (p. 124). From there, Vincent turns to Jewish and Christian theological responses to the Shoah, most of which she finds unsatisfactory in some way. Vincent refuses a ‘neat, simple, easily optimistic’ (p. 172) conclusion, since ‘the events of the twentieth century constitute a thorough assault on traditional forms of memorialization’ (p. 171). She ultimately contends that we ought not place our hope in new memorials, but rather, in a new approach to memorialization. In many ways, Making Memory is just that. Unlike many books about war and genocide, Vincent eschews a discourse of trauma in favour of memorializing as active engagement with the past, typified by her decision to end, not with the Holocaust, but with two Canadian Jewish novels about Holocaust survivors’ children. Time moves forward. A new generation of rememberers are born, and with them, perhaps, new ways of remembering.