An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace and of the Jewish community of a German town that was wiped out in the Holocaust.
Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation
"Language in Cixous's hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities. Her
Osnabruck Station to Jerusalem is an act of imagination, investigation, sojourn, and witness driven by terrible necessity and marbled with fierce, incomparable beauty."--
Maggie Nelson, author of
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace For eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew.
Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did so many wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Cixous reimagines fragments of stories told to her by her mother and grandmother. At their center is the death of a favorite uncle, the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Germany in time to be deported to a death camp.
Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These reflections are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making
Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books.
Hélène Cixous is the author of more than fifty books, including
"Coming to Writing" and Other Essays and
The Portable Cixous.
