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‘A Quilt of Memory’: The Shoah as a Prism in the Testimonies of Survivors of the Dictatorship in Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2014

Liliana Ruth Feierstein
Liliana Ruth Feierstein*
Affiliation:
Universität Konstanz, ERC-Project ‘Narratives of Terror and Disappearance’, Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, José Hernández 1750, Ciudad de Buenos Aires (1426), Argentina. E-mail: lfeierstein@seminariorabinico.org.ar
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Abstract

This paper analyses testimonies of survivors of the detention camps operated by the last military dictatorship in Argentina, with special attention to the functions served by the referencing of testimonies of the Shoah (above all in Ese infierno, a collective testimony by five women in dialogue form). The intertextuality herein assumes different functions in the shaping of discourses and representations, whether in the form of a quotation, an epigraph, a metaphor, an endeavour to legitimise what is being said, a comparison, or an effort to incorporate one’s own experience into a narrative of the catastrophe already so well known in human history.

Type
Focus: Transnational Memory in the Hispanic World
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 585 - 593
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

References and Notes

1.Messuse (Yiddish) from the Hebrew mezuza: small parchment scroll affixed to the doorpost to inscribe the teachings of the Torah ‘on the doorposts of your house and on your gates’. It designates the space as Jewish. All translations are my own.Google Scholar
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4.Feinmann, J.P. (2000) Adorno y la ESMA. Página 12 (Buenos Aires). The intertextuality involves the text of Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung nach Auschwitz. ESMA is the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, the largest and best-known (with an ‘iconic function’) camp of torture in Argentina.Google Scholar
5.Actis, M., Aldini, C., Gardella, L., Lewin, M. and Tokar, E. (2006) Ese infierno. Conversaciones de cinco mujeres sobrevivientes de la ESMA (Buenos Aires: Altamira, first edition 2001).Google Scholar
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