Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace

Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation

For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabr ck were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabr ck counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that H l ne Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabr ck Station to Jerusalem.

Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabr ck's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, ve, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of ve's and Rosi's stories, including the death of ve's uncle, Onkel Andr . Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabr ck, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabr ck 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 hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabr ck Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books.

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Author: Hélène Cixous
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 03/03/2020
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.20w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9780823287628
ISBN10: 0823287629
BISAC Categories:
- History | Holocaust
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs

About the Author
Hélène Cixous (Author)
Hélène Cixous is the founder of the first Women's Studies program in France, at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1967, she has published more than fifty "fictions," as well as numerous works of criticism on literature and many essays on the visual arts. She has long been a collaborator with Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil and a number of her plays have been published. Her many books include Coming to Writing and Other Essays and The Portable Cixous.

Eva Hoffman (Foreword By)
Eva Hoffman is author of the best-selling memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. Her other books include Shtetl, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, and two novels, The Secret and Illuminations.

Peggy Kamuf (Translator)
Peggy Kamuf is Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her books include Book of Addresses, which won the René Wellek Prize, and, most recently, Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty.