Place, identity and memory : a study of American ante-bellum autobiographical slave narratives, and Holocaust survivor accounts by Jews living in Bialystok, Poland, after 1918 and up to 1943

Marlow, Margaret (2006) Place, identity and memory : a study of American ante-bellum autobiographical slave narratives, and Holocaust survivor accounts by Jews living in Bialystok, Poland, after 1918 and up to 1943. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

The thesis is an interdisciplinary study of the interaction between the construction of place and personal identity. Using theories and ideas from the fields of autobiography, memory and social geography, it offers a comparative analysis of mainly autobiographical writings of American anti-bellum slaves, and Holocaust survivors from Bialystok, Poland. The principal aims are to provide a new perspective on some famous slave texts which have already been researched in detail in other ways, and to bring more to the fore accounts by ‘ordinary’ people who survived the Holocaust.

Due consideration is given to the literary and social pressures and influences on the authors. Key questions such as what caused writers’ sense of particular places to develop, how this affected their personal identities, and why this sense endured or changed over time are examined. For the slave writers, the significance of gender, feelings of rootedness and the phenomenon of places in imagination is demonstrated by reference to a number of narratives. In addition, the texts and supporting papers of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass are given extra attention. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the importance of Bialystok as a Jewish centre is discussed. Five main texts are examined to consider the effects of interwar Polonization and subsequent Russification, the cause and effect of the meanings of a place, and the diverse nature of personal Jewishness. The separate analysis of Samuel Pisar’s autobiography allows for consideration of the changeability and contradictoriness of the meaning of a particular place and how more than one place could be simultaneously meaningful.

Finally, the comparative element of the thesis, which considers the implications of the similarities of and differences in slaves’ and Jews’ attachment to their home places, is constructed around the themes of place meanings, as well as individuals’ need for roots.

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