Memorias judías en la reciente narrativa testimonial argentina

The question of the (im)possibility of representing the construction of post-traumatic memories continues to provoke debates and different responses in Argentinean society. Since the post-dictatorship period, the identification of the local catastrophe with the Holocaust has been more strongly expressed than in other contexts. Its incidence in essayistic and literary reconstructions is due, among other things, to the numerical importance, as well as to the socio-cultural influence of the Jewish community in Argentina. To contribute to the debate, in this paper I explore in the narratives of five Argentinean authors, who have published their works between 2007 and 2018 (Laura Alcoba, Mariana Eva Perez, Ángela Urondo Raboy, Raquel Robles, Ángela Pradelli), the presence or absence and the diverse resignifications of Jewish memories, addressing the following questions: Does the inclusion or not of the Jewish in the narratives depend on the family ties represented in the text? What functions does the inclusion of Jewish memories play in some of these catastrophe narratives? To answer these questions, I first provide a brief overview of the history of Jewish communities in Argentina, which also allows us to trace the links between the works of authors of Jewish origin and their family history. I then illustrate the debates in historical-sociological and literary studies about the relevance of the Holocaust model for understanding the practices of state terrorism and the reception of Primo Levi. After the presentation of the corpus, I discuss the narrativisations of Jewish heritages, the presence or not of the conceptualisations under debate and the attribution of agentivity to the protagonists of the events related to the matrices of Jewish history.