ABSTRACT
In this article we try to analyse the relationship constructed between the memories of individuals and collective memory. This analysis is based on the confrontation of two types of sources: on the one hand the Yisker-biher or "books of memories" devoted to several hundred Jewish communities of the Diaspora (mostly in Poland), and on the other, autobiographies of Jews, both written (selected among the many published in the last ten years) and oral. Both kinds of texts are part of a literature of memorial and of mourning which makes use of analogous procedures and themes. Despite the diveristy and the irreducible uniqueness of each lived experience, the individual accounts all recount, basically, the same trials: uprooting, migration, persecution, exile and impossibility of mourning. The authors of the autobiographies, in their role as spokespeople for others, who are no longer alive to bear witness, contribute not only to transmit individual memories, but also to reconstitute a collective memory. Inversely, collective memory takes its substance from individual memories, and bases its rhythm and movement upon them. These exchanges, in the form of chiasmes, creates a memory which is both unified and multiple, where individual memories reproduce general categories which subsume them and give them meaning.
