ABSTRACT
Though concerned almost in its entirety with the problematics of traumatic memory in the twentieth century, and in particular with the Holocaust and the forgotten Jews of Poland, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka’s refl ections on the construction of collective memory in Frames of Rembrance (2007)1 are equally pertinent to the excavation of the intentionally interred history that is the backdrop to Beloved: “[T]o secure a presence for the past demands work-‘memory work’—whether it is writing a book, fi lming a documentary or erecting a monument” (FR: 13), particularly a past that has been “confi ned to oblivion” (14).
