THE TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HOLOCAUST TRAUMA
THE TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HOLOCAUST TRAUMA

Summary/Abstract: Temporality is an intriguing issue: time governs our lives; yet, when we are asked to explain this concept, we are hard-pressed to answer. Difficulties concerning our ordinary, everyday understanding of time arise even with regard to the familiar tripartite division of human experience into the categories of past, present and future. Although scholars have been unable to arrive at a satisfactory definition of this notion, there seems to be consensus in arguing that the different moments of time are linked to each other by a relation of interdependence rather than by one of independence. In this paper I intend to show that traumatic episodes violate the principle of causality implicit in understandings that privilege a relation of interdependence between the different moments of time. Insofar as trauma is an overwhelming event that is not fully grasped at the moment of its occurrence (but rather in delayed responses), this is an experience that alters the relation between past, present and future and, consequently, the ways in which we define ourselves. Here I shall focus on the Holocaust and the problems that its victims have had when requested to explain their experience, for which I shall resort to Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust novella Rosa.

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