The Multidirectional Turn in the Literature about Holocaust in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine (On the Material of Sofia Andrukhovych’s Amadoka)

Résumé 0

The contested historical memory of the Second World War in Ukraine has exposed an uneasy transition from an ethnolinguistic type of national identity to the idea of Ukraine as a political nation, expedited with the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Many Ukrainian writers of non-Jewish origin began to write about the fate of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust. If a previous generation of post-Soviet Ukrainian writers have embedded Jewish characters and subplots about the Holocaust into their historical novels about colonization by the Soviet Union and the national struggle for independence during the war, the new generation of writers reveals a shift from the idea of a homogeneous “national memory” to an idea of the “multidirectional” memory of the Second World War which had a profound traumatic impact on all actors involved in it. The growing interest among non-Jewish Ukrainian writers in the contested history of the Holocaust has been shaped by the unexpected affinity seen between the suffering of Ukrainians at present and of Jews in the past, which unifies them in collective victimhood. This paper examines the contested memory of the Holocaust in Sofia Andrukhovych’s novel Amadoka (2020). The writer develops a complex narrative structure that captures the traumatic memory of Second World War from the perspective of different actors, showing that the extermination of Jews in Buczacz was a communal tragedy that can be represented only through a polyphonic act of remembrance taking place on a shared if uneven terrain. Employing two concepts from memory studies – dismemory and Postmemory – the analysis of the narrative construction of traumatic memory in Amadoka aims to show how literary narrative can capture trauma, on the one hand, and how trauma can shape identity, on the other.