Toward the Expression of Shoah. Language Issue in Erwin Schenkelbach’s Stories.

Abstract

Language represents different levels and is characterized by different semiotic registers in the context of the investigated collection of narratives. In particular, it relates to the language connections with acts of reading, speaking and writing. One of the clearly defined levels of language manifestation can be considered the functional field of the main character. Reading for him is the key to the world of culture and one of the ways of being in the world.
 Child narrator also creates his own reading technique – parallel simultaneous reading. Reading is meaningful sign of the narrator’s family life too. Narrator’s memories bring out images of reading parent, their favourite books and authors. Catastrophe carries a quantity of different dimensions of language, among which language as a strategy of survival. Stylistic speech registers actuate gender and sociolect issue. Unconventional dimension of language saves life of the hero in extreme survival situations. In the times of war language, on the one hand, divides world into ours and strangers, cuts the time for then and now, on the other hand, language is subjected to the pressure of alienation and ambivalence. Language also plays significant role in the process of hero’s self- identification. Traumatic experience of Shoah motivates the narrator to formulate fundamental questions in the context of self-identification processes. An important level of language functioning in short stories is the level of author's poetic system with its dialogical and intertextual peculiarities. This level is influenced by B. Schulz’s prose, E. Jabès’ poems and K. Jaspers’ concept of talking through the Second World War traumatic experience. Phenomenon under analysis requires further examination, including the involvement of a wider range of comparative materials connected with survivors' experience of Shoah from the child narrator modeling perspective. Specificity of the creation of the Other in E. Schenkelbach’s short stories deserves for a separate subject conversation. This will be the subject of our further research studies.