ABSTRACT
An awareness of the diverse identity formations to be found in women's texts is important
in the construction of a literary history of the last decades of the twentieth century, which is
a narrative interplay of different voices and different identity constructs. Giuliana
Morandini1 and Edith Bruck2 bring to their fiction the dimension of mitteleuropean and
Eastern European-Jewish culture respectively. Their works are structured around the inter-
action between metaphor and reality, past and present. They share the need to remember
with clarity both the events and the culture of the past and the courage to overcome the pain
of living. Their works offer a multilayered account of women's dilemmas and of the (redis-
covery of identity.3 Identity implies qualities of continuity, sameness and repeatability: 'To
give birth is to multiply one's self'.4 However, it also suggests difference and otherness.
