Radzanów wyobrażony w powieści Normana Ravvina The Girl Who Stole Everything (2019)

Abstract

The chapter discusses the latest novel by a Canadian Jewish writer of Polish extraction, Norman Ravvin, entitled The Girl Who Stole Everything, through the prism of Marianne Hirshʼs postmemory and Pierre Noraʼs lieu de mémoire. It provides an autobiographical context for the analyzed narrative and underlines the writerʼs opposition to the idea of tragic tourism, that is, organised trips for Jewish groups to the Nazi concentration camps and places of mass death of European Jews. Sending his imaginary character of a middle-aged Canadian to Radzanów, Ravvin pays a tribute to the birthplace of his maternal grandmother. Steeped in the Romantic tradition, the novel employs symbolic figures and rituals to evoke the atmosphere of loss and haunting. Nonetheless, The Girl Who Stole Everything also constitues a meditation over the power and value of personal memory and the traps of (re)constructed history.