Journal Article

Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille

Lukic, Anita

2020

Overview

Adriana Altaras’ autobiographical novel Titos Brille productively challenges the category of the “Eastern turn,” first introduced and formulated by Brigid Haines. Unlike other writers from the former Yugoslavia, who mostly focus on the civil wars of the 1990s, Altaras engages readers through the strategy of double deixis in contextual anchoring. The figure of the dybbuk, which alternately appears as her deceased mother and father, addresses readers in the second person as interlocutors and thereby implicates them in the preservation of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy. In the context of Western European debates about post-national memory, she inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia. The reconstruction of anti-fascist and post-national memory opens up a path for southern Slavs to participate in European integration and post-war reconciliation.

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH Co. KG