1 - “A Tale Repeated Over and Over Again”: Polyidentity and Narrative Paralysis in Thane Rosenbaum's Elijah Visible

Summary

Born after the war, because of the war, sometimes to replace a child who died in the war, the Jews I am speaking of here feel their existence as a sort of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but from a time, now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself.

— Nadine Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown”

Canvases of Trauma and Grief

In “Romancing the ϒohrzeit Light,” the second short story in Thane Rosenbaum's collection Elijah Visible, Adam Posner, a New York painter, seeks a viable medium through which he can articulate his grief over the death of his mother, a Holocaust survivor. His sense of obligation to honor his mother becomes even more difficult because of his history of rebellion against the religious traditions that were important to her. His radical break with Judaism has long since erased any familiarity with Jewish mourning ritual: “Adam didn't know the prayers; the kaddish remained a mystery, like a foreign language. The Hebrew vowels and consonants just wouldn't come. He may have once known them, but no longer” (23). Unable to mark his mother's death in the language of Jewish tradition, he turns to the one language he masters — that of art.