Memory beyond Words : Narratives of the Shoah in Swedish Author Zenia Larsson’s Works

Zenia Larsson (1922-2007) was born into a Jewish family in Łódź and settled down in Sweden in 1945 after surviving deportation to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She chose Swedish as her language when, in the late 1950s, she started writing, motivated by the need to give testimony to her experience. Yet, she soon realised that she could not face her own past directly, and thus chose the novel form, which resulted in a trilogy, autobiographically inspired: Skuggorma vid träbron (The Shadows by the Wooden Bridge, 1960), Lång är gryningen (Long is the Dawn, 1961), Livet till mötes (Meeting Life, 1962). In these works, she still avoids narrating the months in the concentration camps, closing her first volume with the deportation from the Łódź ghetto and starting the second one with the liberation. Anders Ohlsson describes this technique as an example of “rhetoric of silence”, a not uncommon aspect of Shoah literature. This sharp contrast between the duty to narrate as a witness and the difficulty to recall what is unspeakable is a recurrent theme in Larsson’s narrative production. The paper whose abstract is here published aimed to study how this theme is treated and developed in some of her most relevant works. Moving from Ohlsson’s contribution and the results of studies on Shoah literature, the analysis focused on both fictional and explicitly autobiographical works, inlcuding Morfars kopparslantar (Grandfather’s copper pennies, 1970; travelogue of her journey to Israel); Brev från en ny verklighet (Letters from a New Reality, 1972; collection of letters to a friend); Mellan gårdagen och nuet (Between Yesterday and Now, 1985; collection of articles previously published in newspapers and magazines).