Fugitive Pieces: Listening as a Holocaust Survivor’s Child

Abstract

By locating Holocaust trauma in the aural, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces challenges conventional visual depictions of trauma, and demonstrates its status as a second-generation Holocaust text. If children of survivors are obsessed with listening, they may hear in Fugitive Pieces a novel that ambiguously works within and against the celebratory and psychiatric discourse currently containing Holocaust narrative. And they may hear in the way others celebrate the novel’s beauty, traumatic resolution, and redemptive ending a reluctance to listen to what Michaels says that Jakob really hears when he imagines Bella’s dying voice.