This article analyses Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose from the perspective of trauma studies as a novelistic transposition of “ Sleeping Beauty ” in the context of the Holocaust. It argues that the fairy tale fulfils a key psychological and even existential role for the fictional survivor of the extermination camp, but also a pedagogical, moral and political one through the figure of the cowitness central to the economy of the novel. Through Becca’s recovery of the biographical elements underlying her grandmother’s retelling of the story, Yolen shows how the fairy tale can serve to communicate traumatic personal memories and transmit collective cultural knowledge to counter the disappearance of first-hand witnesses. Excel Templates For Kpis more. Richardson, “ In Search of the Final Solution ”, p. 159. Kokkola, Representing the H • 3 The page references to Yolen’s novel will be given parenthetically in the main text instead of foot • 4 Pierre Janet as paraphrased in I. Kacandes, Talk Fiction, p. 92. Enzymatic Activation Of Alkanes Constraints And Prospects Meaning more. 1In a recent article, Anna Richardson accounts for the significance of the narrative device of “ Historian-As-Detective ” characteristic of contemporary Holocaust fiction as a mirror of the reader’s “ quest for knowledge in the face of a crisis that threatens the fabric of social order ”.

Although Briar Rose (1992) does not figure among the novels listed by Richardson, Jane Yolen’s powerful retelling of the story of “ Sleeping Beauty ” as a disguised Holocaust memoir hybridizes genres still further as it fuses historical fact, detective fiction and the fairy tale to inquire into the communication and transmission of traumatic experience, and confront the ever-pressing problem of historical understanding. Becca, a young American woman, undertakes a journey to Poland to fulfill her promise to her beloved grandmother, Gemma, and solve the mystery of her enigmatic past, thereby reclaiming her family history and Jewish identity. As she travels towards modern-day Kulmhof (Chelmno), the young woman encounters various characters, including a Holocaust survivor known as the Prince who rescued her dying grandmother from a massgrave and organized her flight to the US. Their testimonies confirm the significance of “ Sleeping Beauty ” for Gemma, a tale that enables her to “ turn the unassimilated experience into a story ”. In spite of the clues confirming that she is a Holocaust survivor, however, Gemma’s identity remains elusive and can only be retrieved in fragments. Yolen, Briar Rose, p. 13.

A very prominent theme throughout Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is that of “Judgment vs. Tolerance.” Statements included on the Anticipation Guide should be. Guide, they should write an “A” for agreeing or a “D” for disagreeing in the left-hand column for each statement. Students can complete the guides individually, in pairs.

• 6 Yolen’s novel confirms C. Bacchilega’s observation that “ Postmodern fairy tales exhibit an awarene 2The key to Gemma’s past lies in her grand-daughter’s ability to decode the biographical implications of her obsessive retelling of “ Sleeping Beauty ” “ [w]ith a Yiddish accent ”, which functions as a coded narrative of her miraculous survival of the extermination camp of Chelmno thanks to the intervention of a group of partisans. The fairy tale thus mediates between traumatic memory and consciousness, past and present, reality and fantasy, insofar as the old woman’s compulsive retelling of the tale both articulates and disguises an intimate truth that resists language, logic, order and coherence. “ Sleeping Beauty ” is made to express the unspeakable truth because it offers the consolation of a fairy tale romance lying outside reality, set in a dream-like, magical universe that obeys its own laws and where fantasy reigns supreme.