Webs and Threads and Shirts of Destiny: Textile Imagery and the Aesthetics of Transmission in Barbara Honigmann’s Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004) and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Abstract

Daughter narrators in autobiographical and autofictional texts by contemporary Jewish women writers such as Barbara Honigmann and Katja Petrowskaja employ textile imagery to overcome traumatic ruptures and losses of tradition. The history of (Jewish) embroidery and needlework in general is being evoked and alluded to in their literary texts, often via the character of the grandmother. The act of translation from cultural technique to literary text enables the writers to reconnect with Jewish and female artistic traditions, establishing new transnational genealogies of female artistic creation. Honigmann’s own female and Jewish version of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ and Natalia Ginzburg’s concept of a poetry of ‘nothing much’ advocate a commitment to a poetics of the domestic and the seemingly trivial with a decidedly subversive edge. Both aesthetic approaches turn exclusion from male genealogies of literary and religious authority into a strength, asking questions about truth, memory, belonging and the problem of both traumatic and cultural inheritance. Tweetable Abstract: The use of textile and domestic imagery in the literature of contemporary Jewish women authors serves as a strategy to overcome genealogical and traumatic ruptures.