Of Grandmothers and Bad Wolves: Fairy-Tale, Myth and Trauma in Eva Figes’s Tales of Innocence and Experience

Abstract

Eva Figes’s 2003 memoir Tales of Innocence and Experience is an impressionistic account of a grandmother’s relationship with her granddaughter, in which the grandmother’s own childhood and adolescence and her trauma of loss gradually come to form the central narrative of the book. In rethinking her own experience, Figes resorts to a language and method at once reminiscent of and subverting the ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, Cixous’s écriture féminine, and narratology. All these theories are useful in discussing this book, as she uses a similar approach in bridging the fairytale world, with its own language and structure, to her real-life experiences, together with those of her family and millions of Jewish people caught in the twentieth-century horror of the Holocaust. In rethinking the past, she moves from what Dominick LaCapra (1996, 1998), following Freud,¹ called ‘acting-out’, the painful re-living of trauma and guilt, to a way of coping with trauma, ‘working-through’, thanks to the relationship with her granddaughter. There are two levels in the narrative: the present, when the author-character spends time with her small granddaughter playing, reading, going for walks, and telling stories; and the past, rendered not only through the grandmother’s stories, but also recurring in her memories, dreams, and thoughts. She keeps reliving the most traumatic experience of her life — the loss of her grandparents in the Holocaust, after she was forced to leave Germany together with her parents, assimilated German-Jews.