“Storytelling is an ancient art”: Stories, Maps, Migrants and Flâneurs in Arnold Zable’s Selected Texts

• Authors: Drewniak Dagmara

Abstracts

Nadine Fresco in her research on exiled Holocaust survivors uses the term diaspora des cendres (1981) to depict the status of Jewish migrants whose lives are forever marked by their tragic experience as well as a conviction that “the[ir] place of origins has gone up in ashes” (Hirsch 243). As a result, Jewish migrants and their children have frequently resorted to storytelling treated as a means of transferring their memories, postmemories and their condition of exile from the destroyed Eastern Europe into the New World. Since “[l]iterature of Australians of Polish-Jewish descent holds a special place in Australian culture” (Kwapisz Williams 125), the aim of this paper is to look at selected texts by one of the greatest Jewish-Australian storytellers of our time: Arnold Zable and analyse them according to the paradigm of an exiled flâneur whose life concentrates on wandering the world, sitting in a Melbourne café, invoking afterimages of the lost homeland as well as positioning one’s status on a map of contemporary Jewish migrants. The analyses of Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) and Cafe Scheherazade (2001) would locate Zable as a memoirist as well as his fi ctional characters within the Australian community of migrants who are immersed in discussing their un/belonging and up/rootedness. The analysis also comprises discussions on mapping the past within the context of the new territory and the value of storytelling.

Keywords

EN

Australia literature; Flâneurs; migrant communities; Arnold Zable; post-memory; national identity

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2019
• Issue: 28/3
• Pages: 109-123

Contributors

author

Drewniak Dagmara

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

References

• Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Chakraborty, Debadrita. 2013. “An Interplay of Loss and Hope: Analyzing Diaspora Consciousness in Arnold Zable’s Cafe Scheherazade.” Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies 3: 4–11.
• Derrida, Jacques. 2014. Cinders. Trans. Ned Lukacher. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Freadman, Richard. 2005. “The Bonds of Civility Cut Asunder: Arnold Zable as Post-Holocaust Life Writer.” Biography 28. 1: 117– 129.
• Hirsch, Marianne. 2002 [1997]. Family Frames. Photography Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
• Kamboureli, Smaro. 2000. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
• Kulyk Keefer, Janice. 1996. “Memory, Story, Text: Transcultural Aesthetics and Norman Ravvin’s Café des Westens.” Precarious Present/Promising Future? Ethnicities and Identities in Canadian Literature. Ed. Janice Kulyk Keefer, Danielle Schaub, and Richard E. Sherwin. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. 77–96.
• Kwapisz Williams, Katarzyna. 2016. “Transnational Literary Cultures in Australia: Writers of Polish Descent.” The European Diaspora in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Ed. Bruno Mascitelli, Sonia Mycak, and Gerardo Papalia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 114–135.
• Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–25.
• Pinsker, Shachar. 2016. “Jewish Modernism and Viennese Cafes. 1900–1930.” The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna. Ed. Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeff rey H. Jackson. London and New York: Routledge. 51–66.
• Pollack, Martin. 2014. Skażone krajobrazy. Trans. Karolina Niedenthal. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne.
• Varga, Susan. 2002. “Masterly Tales.” Australian Book Review June – July: 23.
• Watts, Madeleine. 2013. “Interview with Arnold Zable.” Griffi th REVIEW 42: Once upon a Time in Oz. https://griffi threview.com/articles/interview-witharnold-zable
• Wechselblatt Marty, and Arnold Zable. 2001. “Beshert: A Conversation with Arnold Zable.” Antipodes 15. 2: 88–93.
• Zable, Arnold. 1991. Jewels and Ashes. London: Harcourt Brace & Company.
• —. 2001. Cafe Scheherazade. Melbourne: Text Publishing.