ABSTRACT
As the daughter of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding in their homeland and emigrated only after the war, to Canada first and later to Britain, Lisa Appignanesi has been especially sensitive to necessity of interrogating this lacuna, Agamben would say, "attempting to listen to it". In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that "the aporia of Auschwitz is very aporia of historical knowledge: non-coincidence between fact and truth, between verification and comprehension". Just like other assimilated, well-off central and east European Jews, Lisa Appignanesi's parents and their fictional counterparts in novel rejected the option of leaving their Nazi-occupied homeland, managing to escape ghetto confinement, forced labour, and transportation to the death camps by "hiding in plain sight"—what has come to be known as "passing". In being thus unhoused, Appignanesi's (post-)Holocaust Jewish identities have grown receptive to imaginative struggles that try to amend fraught postmemorial historical legacy concealed in folds of enmeshed wartime and contemporary Polish-Jewish relationships.
