A Proust-jelenség és a nők többgenerációs táplálkozási élettörténet-írása mint a holokauszt traumairodalma

The present study is part of a larger project examining various forms of life writing created by several hundred women survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants. Here I discuss a subcategory of life writing, for which I propose the term alimentary life writing, in which the story of the self is closely linked to the production, preparation and consumption of food and where ‘alimentary’ refers not only concretely to food but also to the action of nourishing someone and hence to human relationships. First, I consider this form of writing briefly within the context of the history and the great significance food possesses as a cultural category, in the writings of Georg Simmel, Claude Levi-Strauss, and especially in Proust’s image of the madeleine, which for him represented the affective memory of the senses, different from conventional memory. I then discuss women’s alimentary life writing as trauma literature of the Holocaust, where associations attached to food, recipes, and recipe books are not only crucial to gendered family networks, but also to women’s gendered identity. I discuss the work of five French survivors: Suzanne Birnbaum’s Une française juive est revenue. Auschwitz, Belsen, Raguhn (1946), one of the earliest published concentration camp memoirs, Rebecca Teitelbaum’s miraculously surviving camp recipe book, Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ consciously literary memoir, Et tu n’est pas revenue (2015), Nadine Heftler, Si tu t’en sors… Auschwitz, 1944-1945 (1992), and Hélène Stark’s Mémoires d’une juive hongroise, 1940-1945 (1981), who was not in a concentration camp but survived in hiding in a small village. In the final section I discuss how recipes continue to provide a foundation for life writing into the 1.5 and second generation of Holocaust survivor families, through sociologist Anny Bloch’s Une famille juive du temps de l’exode (2017) the history of her patriotic Jewish-Alsatian family, and second-generation French-Hungarian, Viviane Chocas’s Bazar Magyar: Les saveurs du passé sur le bout de la langue (2006).