RCAAP Repository

The cultural decentering of Romania is well known and deeply studied by its philosophers at least since the nineteenth century. This small country, with its language of Latin ancestry, its architecture and political - cultural structures derived at the same time from France and Italy, is embedded in the midst of nations – even of Slavic powers – and of the imperial political vastness represented by Hungary. Such decentering would, in a sense, propel a vanguard, notably composed of Jews, to structure a broad cultural apocalypse since the beginning of the twentieth century – a revolutionary project that would affect not only Romania but all of Europe. Such a cultural apocalypse, it is necessary to emphasize, was amplified enough by not having roots or forms of identification that arrested him to a country, a landscape. Our article will address the late developments of this project, when the authors of the “Infra-Noir” group faced their exile discourse, the genocidal totalitarianism(s) that successively dominated Romania and much of Europe.

This article proposes to discuss the rescue of Jews by Jews during the Holocaust. The best-known phenomenon of Jewish saviors refers to the Righteous of Nations, non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews without demanding anything in return. Despite the contiguity of both phenomena, the differences outweigh the similarities. The rescue of Jews by Jews is an unknown phenomenon and, indubitably, less known compared to the saga of the Righteous of Nations. In the end, we conclude with their absence in the memory of the Holocaust.

In this article, we reconstitute the proposal and the trajectory of the Virtual Archive on the Holocaust and Antisemitism, Arqshoah, and its symbiosis with initiatives aimed at human rights education. Having as its central axis the testimonies of refugees of Nazi-fascism and of Holocaust survivors living in Brazil or who had the country as one of the stages of their crossing, the Arqshoah, as a guardian of the collection that it houses, a producer of an archive of oral history, and a catalyst for initiatives on human rights education is a reference not only for those who wish to deepen their knowledge on the history of that period, but also for any agent committed to the development of a culture of peace.

This paper aims to meditate on ethical-aesthetical aspects of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, in Berlin, based on a multidisciplinary approach, in which particular discussions of the fields of arts, literature and history interact. Formal specificities of the memorial are therefore put in relation: from its concrete presence as a monument, to the long debate on the very possibility of a memory of Auschwitz in which the ethical commitments to remember a past of death and the call to transform life in the present meet. The paper goes on investigating forms of storytelling that take place precisely where “presence” and “image” meet – beetween image and memory –instead of opposing the monument’s materiality to its graveyard metaphor. Finally, as acritical key, the text explores the particular figure of a storyteller who, in the face of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, is able to collect the traces of a past which contains within itself its future in the evanescent instant of a bump between life and history.

This article addresses the participation of Jewish soldiers in the Força Expedicionária Brasileira (FEB), the only troop of a Latin American country to enter combat in World War II. Also object of study of this article are the Nazi attack that determined Brazil's entry into the war, the formation of BEF, and the main battles fought, all with relevant participation of Jewish soldiers. A list of FEB Jewish soldiers, and mini-biographies of some who stand out most in combat, or in postwar civilian life, are presented

The following article interprets the representation of the Shoah in terms of a latent presence in two novels by Clarice Lispector, “The Besieged City” and “The Hour of the Star”, using the concepts of latency and Stimmung, elaborated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in the context of the Western culture after 1945.

In a crucial sequel to the film Saul fia/Son of Saul, 2015, by the Hungarian director László Nemes, we accompany, at the height of the "Final Solution" of the Shoah, a member of the Sonderkommando, Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) approach a rabbi in the territories of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “Rabbi: -Get rid of him. Do you know the prayer? I willpray. His name. You can not do anything else. Saul: That's not enough. You know it. You know!” Saul, in this context, obsessively wishes to perform the Kaddish ritual for a boy, presented as his supposed son, who had recently died in the gas chamber and should have the body cremated as hundreds of thousands of people in these specific concentration camps. Having such a film as a corpus of study, we will observe and analyze how a religious and cultural practice is able to reestablish memories of the tradition of the Hebrew people during Shoah, to resuscitate dehumanized subjects by the varied and chronic devices of violence, as well as, and above all, to extend such practice of human care and respect for the other peoples involved in the tragedy.

Auschwitz has often been thought of as an indescribable event that is beyond all possible linguistic means of representation. Italian author Primo Levi (1919-1987) attempted to address this problem revealing the aporetic (and paradoxical) nature of the process of elaborating a literary testimony: impossible, but necessary. This article aims to analyse some of the ethical and epistemological issues that testimony of a traumatic event can raise for literature. The hypothesis is that the testimony, as Levi elaborated it, contains a lacuna or a void, which is in fact what constitutes it: while witnesses present the limit-experience out of obligation, they cease to convey others due to inability or incapacity. The argument here is that what makes a testimony on a traumatic event possible is its incomplete nature, which gives strength to the process of communicating limit-experiences. 

Fictional narrating of the Shoah, evidencing the fragmentation in and of the discourse through lists and enumerations seems to be a possible approximation in David Grossman's novel See Under: Love. In addition to the mere verification of ruptures, this article searches, in the analysis of lists constructed by narrators and characters, not to ignore the "evocation of memorable images", as wanted Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.

This article focuses on the analysis of a set of memories of Jewish refugees in Portugal during World War II. The data were collected through in –depth interviews with some of the few of these refugees who remained, from the thousands that have passed here, in the middle of the sec. XX, in flight from the Holocaust and analyzed in the light of theoretical lenses of anthropology, by a qualitative methodology. The interpretative model followed, in addition to the necessary historical alignment, contemplates the perspectives in turn of the notion of memory, refugee and rites of passage, especially considering the moment of the arrival of the Jews in search of exile, in Portugal at that time.

This article to analyze the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist, published in 1998, which originated the eponymous Roman Polanski film, released in 2002, with other writers who wrote about memory, self-writing, and testimonial literature. To remember is, in the context of this work, to seek the cure of ills, to record what happened and, perhaps, through some reflections, to prevent atrocities from recurring.

The industrial city of Łódź was the second largest city in Poland and housed the second-largest Jewish community of the country when the Nazis decided to germanise it, segregating their Jews in what became the second-largest ghetto of ocuppied Poland. The Łódź ghetto became known by the apparent passivity of its inhabitants, fame that brought about the obliteration of resistance as the carpenters’ strike in January 1941. This article aims to shed some light on this that was, presumably, the most important strike held by the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto demanding better conditions of life to the Jewish leader, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.

This article deals with the influence of the Islamic culture in medieval times on the Biblical commentaries of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra. According to Ibn Ezra the reality in the Muslim region, which includes the Bible lands preserves the ancient ways of life. The current study focuses his comparison between Arabs rulers and ancient kings' customs.

The struggle for Emancipation mobilized the European Jewish masses throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Russia, this struggle converged with the social upheaval that mobilized the entire population and found its maximum expression in the revolutions of 1917, which resulted in the fall of the tsarist regime and the establishment of the Soviet Union. In the process, the Jews created the Bund, representative of workers, with a clearly socialist worldview, which played a prominent role in the creation of the Social Democratic Labor Party, later the Communist Party. Paradoxically, the Jews continued to face the secular Russian anti-Semitism, even after the success of the Revolution. Involvement with revolutionary activity and expectations regarding the situation that could result from the new regime found space for reflection in the literature produced at the time by Jewish writers.

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Resenha a: ALMEIDA, Nilton Melo. Judeus no Ceará: séculos XIX e XX. São Paulo: Intermeios, 2016. 374 p.  

Resenha a: NORMAN: confie em mim. Roteiro e direção: Joseph Cedar. Produtores: David Mandill, Lawrence Inglee e Miranda Bailey. Distribuidor: California Filmes. 2016 (no Brasil em 2017). 117 min.