Jewish woman's basin. A living full-term Jewish child

Already in the first half of this century, attention was drawn to the extremely important and interesting fact that the size and shape of the pelvis of an adult woman are significantly different in individuals belonging to different races, peoples, tribes. This phenomenon is especially important from the obstetric point of view, was subsequently confirmed by the works of numerous authors and is now considered a fact beyond any doubt.

Introduction:The Mediation of Failed Mediation

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski published a book that was to become a source of fierce controversy. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood recounts Wilkomirski’s experiences of surviving alone two concentration camps as a small Jewish child from Poland. Having lived most of his life as Bruno Dössekker, the adopted son of a Swiss couple, Wilkomirski claimed to have discovered his true identity through a long psychoanalytic process, which led to writing his story. The book quickly received popular and critical acclaim and won a number of literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award. What happened next is fairly well known: a 1998 newspaper article cast doubt as to the authenticity of Wilkomirski’s account, revealing instead the story of a Bruno Grosjean, the illegitimate son of an unmarried woman who had given him away for adoption in Switzerland. The book’s publisher then commissioned a historian to look into the allegations, which were consequently found to be correct. The book previously described as “achingly beautiful” and “morally important” was now declared as fake and its author a fraud. The Wilkomirski case has since figured in debates on Holocaust memory as a cautionary tale about the facility with which one can pass as a survivor— and convince a worldwide audience. The book was discontinued as memoir only later to be released in tandem with the historical study finding it false. While Wilkomirski’s memories may have been fabricated, the way they were depicted in the book is a fairly accurate description of traumatic memory. Even if the content of these memories is made- up their structure very much conforms to a psychology textbook entry on post- trauma. Evidently Wilkomirski was aware of this fact, as in the afterword to the book, he urges others in a similar situation to “cry out their own traumatic childhood memories.”

Silence and the Perils of Identity

This chapter considers Solinger’s experience as a white, Jewish child in mid-twentieth-century Cincinnati, in a culture in which no adult she knew, including the rabbi, ever mentioned the Holocaust. At the same time, these adults, including her “liberal” parents, treated the African American domestic workers in their households as marks and proof of white supremacy. Solinger interrogates the sources and effects of Jewish silence regarding the murder of European Jews, and the 1967 African American rebellion in Cincinnati, and speculates about relationships between these events. Solinger ties this personal, family, community, and global history to her emergence as a historian.

Hawthorne’s Rome – A city of evil, political and religious corruption and violence

Hawthorne’s Rome is the home of dark and evil catacombs. It is a city haunted by evil spirits from the past that actively shape the romance’s plot. Rome’s dark gardens, endless staircases, hidden corners and vast catacombs, as well as the malodorous Jewish ghetto, affect Donatello’s and Miriam’s judgment, almost forcing them to get rid of the Model, Miriam’s persecutor. Hawthorne’s narrator’s shockingly violent, harsh and seemingly anti-Semitic description of the ghetto in Rome is just one among many similarly ruthless, and at times offensive, accounts of the city wherein Hawthorne situates his last completed romance, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne’s two-year stay in Rome in 1858-59 sets the scene for his conception of The Marble Faun. In addition to providing Hawthorne with the extensive contact with art and artists that undoubtedly affected the choice of his protagonists (Kenyon, a sculptor; Hilda and Miriam, painters), Italy exposed Hawthorne to Jewish traditions and history, as well as to the life of Jews in the Roman ghetto. Most probably it also aroused his interest in some of the political affairs in which Italian Jews were involved in the 1840s and 50s. This historical background, especially the well-publicized abduction and conversion of a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 1858 provides important political and cultural background for Hawthorne’s portrayal of Miriam in The Marble Faun.