Memory and Fantasy: The Imaginative Reconstruction of a Lost Past in <em>Las cartas que no llegaron</em>

Abstract

Since the end of World War II literature has generated an intense debate regarding the relationship between historical reality and its representation through fiction. One could even say that representation itself, when faced with the collective trauma of the Holocaust, entered into a profound crisis. As philosophers and thinkers of all kinds struggled to come to terms with the horrors endured by millions in Nazi concentration camps, they began to question the possibilities and limits of representation as well as the problems associated with collective and individual memory. Adorno's well-known dictum, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarie (34), often serves as a point of departure for this discussion and has provoked different reactions from many, ranging from those who reject any artistic approach to the Holocaust to those who defend fiction as a possible means of overcoming the limits of historical representation. Although it does not necessarily fall within the category of literature, the autobiographical novel Las cartas que no llegaron (2000)' by Uruguayan playwright and novelist Mauricio Rosencof can be read within the context of this debate. Rosencof is the son of Jewish parents, who emigrated from Poland in the late 1920s hoping to improve their life in Uruguay. In the 1960s, Rosencof became one of the leaders of the National Liberation Army (the socalled Tupamaros), an urban guerilla group that was overthrown by the Uruguayan army in 1972, leading to his arrest and subsequent imprisonment during the military dictatorship (1973-1985). In Las cartas que no llegaron^ Rosencof tells us the story of his life, in which he confronts not only his memories of thirteen years of terror and deprivation, but also an earlier traumatic episode in his family's life— the disappearance of the relatives left behind in Poland, all of whom