To Name One’s Death: Storytelling and Storysharing in Halina Duraj’s The Family Canon (2015)
For immigrants, the aftermath of trauma is often carried across borders and passed down to children. Halina Duraj’s collection of short stories, The Family Cannon, grapples with trauma, and maintaining a sense of self through “storysharing” as narrated by the Polish-American daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Magda. As seen primarily in the opening eponymous story, “Tenant”, “Witness”, and “The Company She Keeps”, Duraj explores how immigrants and children of immigrants preserve their agency through storytelling storysharing. This essay examines these functions of storytelling and storysharing as portrayed in The Family Cannon from an academic standpoint.
The article, “Feminism, Therapeutic Culture, and the Holocaust in the United States: The Second-Generation Phenomenon”, by Arlene Stein discusses how children of Holocaust survivors in the 1970s established outlets to process their experiences as a community. These children of survivors created spaces to examine how the legacy of the Holocaust influenced their lives and families (Stein 28). The spaces were heavily influenced by the Women’s Liberation and the Black Power Movements, which were in turn influenced by the culture of “psychological introspection as a political act” (Stein 29). The spaces encouraged storysharing, that is, for “their participants to publicly acknowledge their injuries” and make “selfhood a narrative to be shared publicly” (Stein 30). While Duraj’s narrative seems to be set a little after that time, with “The Family Cannon” most likely taking place in the early 1980s, the collection still follows the structure and functions that much of the activism in the 1970s utilised. The collection “probes the past” (Stein 29), and examines how parents’ trauma manifests in the next generation (Stein 42).
In “Second-Generation”, Stein comes from the understanding that many survivors simply did not discuss their experiences (Stein 29). However, Stein posits that storysharing is catharsis because “by talking about their experiences, victims of trauma could work through the past and transform themselves into survivors” (Stein 35). Throughout Magda’s childhood, she has been told the story of how her father, Witek Witeki, escaped from Auschwitz. While Witek’s actions stand in opposition with the silence that was characteristic of Holocaust survivors (Stein 36), In The Family Cannon it seems that this silence holds true for everyone else. In “Witness” our narrator recalls a Polish professor who visits her home; after one of Witek’s extensive retellings of his escape story, the Polish professor discloses to Magda’s mother that his own father-in-law was in Auschwitz, “[b]ut he never mentioned it once. Not to anyone. He came back and never said a word. He wouldn’t tell you if you asked” (Duraj 48). The reader is left to interpret why Magda’s father chooses to retell his experience, especially after Witek meets Sal Silverstein, a Polish Jew and fellow Auschwitz survivor. Witek’s encounter with Sal Silverstein is the primary narrative in “Witness”. After losing his ability to speak and walk due to a stroke, Witek is put into a geriatric home. When he meets Sal and learns that he is also an Auschwitz survivor, Witek is eager to tell his story, even though he cannot actually speak. Although Magda realises that this is what her father wants, she is at first reluctant. By the second day she acknowledges: “Everyone should be able to say what he needs to say. A drink of water, please. Leave my tray. Here’s my story” (Duraj 46); telling his story was as important to Witek as his ability to state his own wants and needs, and thus, preserve his autonomy.
Much of Magda’s reluctance to share her father’s story comes from the fact that much of the story is untrue. While her father had in fact been in Auschwitz, he had not escaped on his own. Instead, he had been liberated, and his elaborate escape-story was actually his desertion of the Russian army. It is not until her father begins to suffer from senile dementia that she even learns this. During a Skype interview at Agnes Scott College, author Duraj states “family stories are almost like a mythology” (Duraj 2015). Witek has crafted a mythology for his own family: from the aliases he keeps (Duraj 15) to his version of his life before America. Simply telling his story is an act of catharsis, but Witek regains his agency by changing his story so that he is not “passively liberated” (Duraj 2015) and instead he becomes the hero of his own story. Magda’s mother explains that “[d]eserting the army is a great disgrace in Poland[;] Not something you want your children to know” (Duraj 25). In his version he is no longer a coward and a victim who deserted the army and had to be saved from Auschwitz, but a survivor that fought tooth and nail for his own freedom. The article “Truth and Lies: Manipulation of Truth in the Use of Oral Narratives” (Stotter 1996) quotes a 1988 New York Times essay by Anna Quindlen saying, “it is difficult to explain that there are some things more important than – or perhaps just different from – the literal truth, and that one of those is creating the life of your family in hindsight” (qtd. in Stotter 64). While it takes some time for Magda to come to terms with this, she acknowledges: “[e]veryone should be able to say what he needs to say” (Duraj 46), and that there is more value to Witek’s tale than strictly telling the truth.
Despite the value of storytelling beyond the empirical truth, learning that something you thought was true is not based in fact “[devalues] the transformation, understanding, trust and bonding [one feels] listening to story-tellers telling personal stories” (Stotter 1996). As such, even after recognising her father’s reasoning, Magda remains reluctant to share her own stories. “The Second-Generation Phenomenon” explored how children of survivors often took on and manifested their parents’ traumas in various ways (Stein 42). One of the manners of this the article described was “emotional inaccessibility” (Stein 42), which we see in Magda’s hesitation to engage in storysharing. In “Tenants”, Magda’s friend Lila who is renting Magda’s empty family home, is willing to share details of her own life but Magda keeps her at arm’s length. However, Lila is a “self-proclaimed clairvoyant” (Duraj 68), and spurs Magda to exorcise her ghosts, (both that of the previous tenant of Lila’s room that committed suicide and Magda’s emotional ones), through storysharing. During their conversation on page 77, it is clear that Lila assumes Magda had been sexually assaulted. However, Magda tells Lila: “I have never seen my parents kiss. I have never even seen them hug. I would bet my life on there not being sex after me” (Duraj 77). After Magda confides in Lila, she visits her parents. There she sees them being more intimate than she had ever seen them: she sees “the hands of two people sleeping, hands enfolded in one another, relaxed, loose, lightly touching” (Duraj 79). The sequence of her storysharing and her seeing this intimacy implies to the reader that they are connected. It is after making “private emotions public” (Stein 29) that Magda sees this moment between her parents and she is able to access the cathartic nature of storysharing. However, she is still unable to fully claim storytelling as she tells Lila “I wish I could tell you what you want to hear” (Duraj 77), and after her dramatic exit on page 78, it is clear that storysharing is challenging for her.
In the closing story, “The Company She Keeps”, we see Magda finally take ownership of the roles storytelling and storysharing have in her living a meaningful life. After breaking off her engagement with her fiancé after his infidelity, she states: “Jay hated dreams in fiction. They’re so [overdetermined], he said” (Duraj 109). This introduces an element of omniscience through acknowledging the collection as a work of fiction. It also makes it unclear if our narrator is Magda or Duraj herself. Despite her former fiance’s distaste for including dreams in fiction, Magda/Duraj ends the collection with one as her final story. By choosing to do so she claims the act of storytelling as her own and acts autonomously. In her dream, she is shot by a gunman. As the gunman is about to shoot her again she wakes up. She says, “I wake from my own death. I begin to name it” (Duraj 109). By naming this dream of death, Magda is finally able to take control of her own narrative. The collection concludes with her taking charge of which stories she tells and how she shares them.
Works Cited
Duraj, Halina. Skype Interview with Agnes Scott College English 110e: Re-Tracing Mother and Daughter Plots. 15 April 2015.
Duraj, Halina. The Family Cannon. New York: Augury, 2014. Print.
Stein, Arlene. “Feminism, Therapeutic Culture, and the Holocaust in the United States: The Second-Generation Phenomenon”. Jewish Social Studies, 16. 1 (2009): 27-53. Web.
Stotter, Ruth. “Truth and Lies: Manipulation of the Truth in the Use of Oral Narratives”. Merveilles & contes, 10.1 (1996): 53-68. Web.