Home as an Uncanny Site of Violence in Polish-Jewish Autobiographical Texts on the Holocaust

Abstract

Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. While home in such texts often invokes childhood and family, in the context of Jewish life in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, home became a complex site with a double function. Because the German authorities targeted Jewish material culture early in World War II, the destruction of communal buildings and family dwellings was unavoidable; for many, it was the first encounter with what would become the Nazi project to murder the Jews of Europe. We argue that home in Jewish wartime autobiographical texts is made to signify both a nostalgic longing for the place and objects that represent intimacy, shelter, and belonging, and at the same time, a marker of profound losses. We trace this double meaning of home by analyzing a range of Polish-Jewish ego-documents from the 1940s. Through this analysis, we show that home’s double function allowed the authors to inhabit (textually) a place of memory, asserting a claim to a prewar life with its own specific material culture, while also depicting a haunted emptiness that stands in for other losses that the writer cannot represent through language. To develop this elaboration of home’s function in the texts, we draw on and expand the concept of domicide, which identifies the loss of home as a specific type of violence. We conclude that the impact of anti-Jewish violence on the self is expressed through memory and uncanny hauntings of material culture.