On the Journey Through Ukraine: Representations of the Holocaust in Friedrich Gorenstein’s Traveling Companions

Abstract

Abstract For about three decades now, there has been an ongoing shift towards Geocritical literary analysis so that reading literature historically is now often supplemented by reading literature geographically, foregrounding the most significant political and natural features of the landscape (borders; big cities; shtetlach; mountains; valleys; rivers; forests), as well as the “mindset” of the population and the major historical events associated with them. Friedrich Gorenstein’s novel Traveling Companions (1989) is devoted most explicitly and holistically to the Holocaust in Ukraine and the dynamics of its spatial representation. Gorenstein also writes in a palimpsest mode: he simultaneously works with multiple layers of memory, not all of it his own, inscribed onto particularly Jewish spaces imbued with dense layers of historical events, ideational developments, and living experiences. The concepts of literary territoriality and the treatment of place, space, flow, and movement in literature and culture, including the interplay between the geographies of the ‘real’ and the geographies of the ‘imaginary’ are critical for the understanding of temporal-spatial displacements employed by Gorenstein as he attempts to reconstruct and interpret the textual map of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Gorenstein’s writing grapples with the complex relationship between the geographical space of Ukraine and the memory of the Holocaust and exposes his readers to the permutations of Jewish history and geography while focusing on the concepts of uprootedness, homelessness, and alienation as well as mass murder and irredeemable evil.