Na początku był Chaos i... Żydówka : o "Włoskich szpilkach" Magdaleny Tulli

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to look at Magdalena Tulli’s Włoskie szpilki (Italian Heels) from the perspective of chaos. It shows that the author, a writer of the post-Holocaust generation, threads her stories with autobiographical elements which are closely connected with the Shoah. She considers the problem from the point of view of a child and an adult woman, who carries inside the stigma of the Holocaust. As a member of the second generation, she did not experience the war, but its results, in the form of legacy left by her mother, have never stopped haunting her. The paper shows that the stigma of her origin, negative childhood experiences, difficult relationship with her mother and the communist reality have thrown the writer’s world into chaos. On the basis of the collection of short stories, it demonstrates that disorder is one of the dominant categories in Tulli’s writings. The specific perspective from which the author recalls the past, reflecting the chaos of World War II and the People’s Republic of Poland, makes Włoskie szpiliki (Italian Heels) one of the most original attempts to approach the tragedy of the second generation writers. Tulli manipulates the categories of time, space and protagonists, reinforcing the sense of chaos. Interconnected by the problem of “shameful origin,” the stories are unique miniatures representing scenes from the author’s own life. With her collection of stories, Tulli entered the canon of writings associated with trauma studies and autobiographical accounts of Jewish women of the post-Holocaust generation. The paper shows that the experience of chaos connected with nationality is the key aspect of text interpretation, both in the plane of form and in the plane of content.