O brilho distante de um pequeno cometa: a cena interior, de Marcel Cohen

Abstract

In Das Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin writes: “The trace is the appearance of proximity, no matter how distant what left it may be”. Marcel Cohen was five years old when, between 1943 and 1944, his family was taken to Auschwitz and only the wife of an uncle survived. In Sur la scène intérieur, book originally published in 2013, he narrates, from traces and vestiges from memory, what he remembers and is able to know about his parents, sister, paternal grandparents, two uncles and a great aunt. This paper analyses Cohen’s memoralistic narration. It seeks, in the light of Benjamin’s thoughts, to reflect about the reconstruction process of the past undertaken by the writer, the inherent instabilities in testimony, to the game of fiction and memory that involves the writing of the family story.