Transgenerational Trauma, Shared Vulnerability and Interconnectedness in Zina Rohan’sThe Small Book

Abstract

This article aims at showing that extreme situations, such as wars, can reveal a common human vulnerability, which thus leads to a lack of sovereignty affecting all the agents implied in the traumatic episode. In Zina Rohan’s 2010 novel, The Small Book, this shared vulnerability crosses time and space boundaries by connecting coetaneous characters and their subsequent generations through inherited traumatic memories. These connections lead Rohan to blur the boundaries between what we may understand as victims and perpetrators of trauma. Thus, drawing on significant theories within the fields of trauma and memory studies as well as on conceptions about human vulnerability and interconnectedness, the main aim of this study is to analyse the key narrative mechanisms used by this British–Jewish author in order to represent the shared vulnerability and exposure to trauma that reigns during war and post-war times.

Female re‐writings of the Jewish diaspora: Metamemory novels and contemporary British‐Jewish women writers

“…The transgenerational negotiation of Jewish identity is not the focus of The Small Book but, as I have said elsewhere, it revolves around the traumas caused by an unfortunate chain of traumatic deaths. These traumatic experiences were first inherited by Pam and Bill and later by Roy and Margaret, producing a family history full of gaps that Roy and his sister try to put together (Pellicer‐Ortín, 2021). On the one hand, the consequences of the First World War firing squads produced a gap and “a trauma‐induced vulnerability” at the heart of Roy and Margaret's family, which would never be fully healed.…”

“…On the one hand, the consequences of the First World War firing squads produced a gap and “a trauma‐induced vulnerability” at the heart of Roy and Margaret's family, which would never be fully healed. Yet, on the other hand, The Small Book proves that what bonds this family is this “shared vulnerability”, which is textualised through the characters' explicit “awareness of their interconnectedness and their need to empathise with the previous generations' traumas” (Pellicer‐Ortín, 2021, p. 349).…”