Memories and Truth

One of the passages that stuck out to me was Kluger’s view on memories: “The most precise memories are thus the ones that seduce us into lies, because they won’t be budged by anything outside ourselves” (34). Following a passage we discussed in lecture about her father being a “divided person,” this quote describes how important it is understand the connection between memory and truth, (or at least that’s what I got out of it). Because her story is unlike other Holocaust biographies and does not play off of sentimentality to gain sympathy, she focuses more on elaborating on the truth, however blunt it may be. Her interest in exposing the truth rather than just emotion relates back to the quote. She states that the most accurate memories manipulate people into building up a false memory of “what should have been” or “could have been;” these memories cannot be affected by outside influence. These memories fester in the mind and the lure of creating “could be” memories or rationalizing why they happened haunt through the form of constant replay.
Also, Kluger elaborates on the kaddish (prayer for the dead). Because Judaism only allows men to say them, she dissociates herself with the religion: “I want to say kaddish because I live with the dead. If I can’t do that, forget about religion. Poetry is more helpful” (31). In a sense, Kluger’s entire novel is a “kaddish;” although not entirely a prayer for the dead, but more of a medium to document her memory of the dead, and her life's memories in general. She is aware of the religion’s constraints on females, and thus carries out her desire to expres the truth and say what she wants through that “poetry.”