*40 minus* (2010; 40 Below), Martina Haag's *Glada hälsningar från Missångerträsk: En vintersaga* (2011; Happy Greetings from Missångerträsk: A Winter's Tale), and Tove Folkesson's *Hennes ord: Värk I–III* (2019; Her Words: Ache I–III).2 The novels are selected to give diverse perspectives on involuntary childlessness; they represent different genres (autofction and popular fction), and the protagonists have different life situations: one lives in a heterosexual relationship (Glaser), one is single, at least in the beginning of the novel (Haag), and one is in a lesbian relationship (Folkesson).

Pernilla Glaser's novel depicts Emma, who is in her late thirties and tries to become pregnant with her male partner Jimpa. They have struggled to have children for four years and gone through two fertility treatments. They both work as architects, but while Jimpa has thrown himself into a promising career, Emma's career has stalled. The novel depicts Emma's life crisis, which plays out in relation to different gendered and heterosexual norms.

Martina Haag's novel centers on forty-four-year-old Nadja, who is on the waitlist to adopt as a single woman. Nadja receives news from the adoption agency about new regulations that will prioritize married couples, which eliminates her chances to adopt. She makes a deal with her sister, Lotta, who will fnd a man Nadja can marry if Nadja takes care of Lotta's father-in-law, Sigvard, while Lotta and her husband go on a trip to Paris to save their marriage. Through a misunderstanding Nadja is put in contact with the wrong man, Jocke, but against all odds Nadja and Jocke fall in love. They decide to get married, but when Jocke fnds out about Nadja's need to marry someone in order to adopt, he feels betrayed and leaves Nadja at the altar. After some time apart the couple reunite at the end of the novel and get married.

Tove Folkesson's autofctional novel depicts the writer Tove and her partner Hanna, who struggle to become parents through donor insemination while building a life on the countryside near Tove's maternal grandmother and uncle's farm, which has been in the family for generations. During the course of the novel, Tove and Hanna go through two inseminations; the frst is initially successful, as Tove gets pregnant, but it ends in miscarriage, and the second fails.

2These novels have not been translated into English, so all translations are my own in collaboration with line editor Rebecca Ahlfeldt.

# "But I Just Wanted to Be Normal": Normative Femininity and the Swedish Gender Equality Ideal

Motherhood is constructed as the core of femininity, and women who have chosen not to become mothers are often viewed as unfeminine (see, for instance, Cummins et al. 2021; Peterson and Fjell 2010, 124–25). The novels discussed in this chapter do not depict women who are voluntarily childless but women who struggle to become mothers. However, the novels still highlight how the protagonists in various ways negotiate normative femininity. To some extent, their status as childless women seems to be a threat to their femininity, but the link between femininity and motherhood is also criticized and undermined in the novels. In this section I will discuss how the three novels' representations of femininity play out against the backdrop of the Swedish gender equality ideal and Swedish pronatalism.

The three novels are published in a Swedish context, where gender equality is conceptualized as a national characteristic (see, for instance, Martinsson et al. 2016). Gender equality has been a core value of the Swedish welfare state, and it is linked to the possibility of combining professional and family life. With the expansion of the public sector after the Second World War, many Swedish women entered the labor market, which in turn led to demands for political measures that would make it possible for women to be working mothers. During the 1970s the social-democratic government launched an ambitious political program aiming at gender equality, with state-subsidized affordable childcare and generous paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers. The Swedish gender equality ideal requires both parents to contribute to the labor market and also to care for their children, thus promoting a dual-earner/dual-carer ideal (see, for instance, Björk 2017; Gottzén and Jonsson 2012; Klinth 2002; Klinth and Johansson 2010; Martinsson et al. 2016). In Swedish politics and public debate, gender equality is usually viewed as an unquestioned goal, and analyzing and critiquing gendered norms and structures are steps in the process of achieving this goal (see, for instance, Dahl 2005).

Swedish gender equality politics is interlinked with progressive family politics as many of the reforms initiated from the 1970s and onward facilitate the combination of career and family life. Through various political measures, the Swedish welfare state has encouraged its citizens to reproduce, at least since the 1930s when birth rates in Sweden fell to a record low. Initially these measures were explicitly pronatalist, as they aimed to increase birth rates. Today Sweden's progressive family politics does not explicitly aim at increasing birth rates, but as I have argued elsewhere, it still has pronatalist dimensions and contributes to pronatalist pressure (Björklund 2021, 191–93, 236–37). Compared to other European countries, Sweden also has high birth rates.

Glaser's novel ties into a Swedish gender equality discourse by highlighting and problematizing how gender roles and gendered structures saturate both professional and personal lives. Emma's and Jimpa's different positions in the job market are a recurring theme. While they were in school together, Emma was the smarter and more hard-working of the two, and everybody had expected her, rather than Jimpa, to get a top job after graduation (Glaser 2010, 129, 220). Emma connects the facts that Jimpa has a better job and a higher salary to gender: "He was a promising young man and she was a diligent girl. There's a difference" (Glaser 2010, 30).3 Gender roles and gendered structures are also visible in the couple's personal lives, especially in their responses to involuntary childlessness. Jimpa pulls away, invests in work, and does not want to talk about the process. Emma is unhappy, and the struggle to have children rules her life. As with gendered structures in professional life, Emma connects some of the differences to gender. She remembers how, as a little girl, she used to play a game that would tell her how many children she would have as an adult: "Emma had once asked Jimpa if he had played that game as a child. He had snorted and laughed and said that little boys don't think about having children. Emma assumed that both little boys and little girls thought about what their adult life would look like. But in order to visualize an adult woman you apparently had to visualize a parent" (Glaser 2010, 81).4 Here Emma's awareness of gender serves a didactic purpose, pointing to how femininity is culturally constructed as linked to motherhood, while masculinity is not linked to fatherhood. Similarly, Emma's critique of the view of the female body as either maternal or an object for men's desire is conveyed in an ironic or humorous way, when she imagines what it is like to have a baby: "What a relief. You could wear a milk-stained college sweatshirt all day and everyone would still fnd you radiantly

3 "Han var en påläggskalv och hon var en duktig ficka. Det var skillnad."

4 "Emma hade frågat Jimpa en gång om han hade lekt den leken när han var liten. Han hade fnyst och skrattat och sagt att småkillar tänker väl inte att de ska ha barn. Emma antog att både småkillar och småtjejer tänkte på hur det skulle bli när de blev vuxna. Men för att tänka sig en vuxen kvinna behövde man tydligen tänka sig en förälder."

beautiful and fresh-looking since you were a Mother with a sacred task" (Glaser 2010, 31).5 She makes clear that as motherhood is positioned at the core of femininity, there is less need for a mother to make an effort to look beautiful in order to perform normative femininity.

The examples above can be understood as the novel writing itself into a Swedish gender equality discourse, in which critiques of gendered structures and stereotypes are part of the process to achieve gender equality. Gendered norms and the link between femininity and motherhood are also critiqued in Haag's novel, though in a slightly different way. While Glaser's Emma still adapts to normative femininity by making motherhood the sole purpose of her life, Haag's Nadja is different. She is into heavy metal and confdently maneuvers Jocke's snowmobile; when Jocke asks if she can do it, she responds: "Of course I can. I've had a driver's license for a [motor] bike since I was sixteen. How much harder can it be to drive one of these?" (Haag 2011, 171).6 Heavy metal, motorcycles, and snowmobiles are conventionally masculine domains, and by embracing them Nadja represents a less conventional femininity. In other ways, Nadja's femininity does not depart too much from the Swedish gender equality ideal. Ulrika Dahl argues that Swedish gender equality politics has aimed at changing the division of labor between women and men—to redefne what both groups can do. But even if men can do household work and women can fx a car, they are not supposed to deviate too much from normative gender roles, as the Swedish gender equality ideal is based on heteronormativity, according to which genders are binary, separate, opposite and supposed to desire each other (Dahl 2005). Similarly, in Haag's novel Nadja can drive a snowmobile, but she still dresses in a conventionally feminine way, with high-heeled boots, thin leather gloves, and a purse.

However, in Haag's novel the link between femininity and motherhood is undermined through humor and performativity. Feminist theory (see, for instance, Butler 1999 [1990]; Lundberg 2008; Österholm 2012) has highlighted how norms of femininity and patriarchal and heteronormative structures can be resisted with the use of humor, failure, and excess. Anna

5 "Vilken befrielse. Man kunde gå runt i en mjölkfäckig collegetröja hela dagen och alla tyckte ändå att man var så strålande vacker och fräsch eftersom man var moooor med ett heligt uppdrag."

6 "Klart jag kan. Jag har haft bågekort sedan jag var sexton, det kan ju inte vara mycket svårare att köra en sån här."

Lundberg (2008) shows how excess and laughter are often used in feminist and queer comic culture to challenge oppressive power structures and indicate that a different social order is possible. In Haag's novel, Nadja adapts to a more conventional femininity that is compatible with ideal motherhood when registering at the adoption agency. Humor is used to highlight how her adaptations to conventional femininity and motherhood are done in a performative manner, which reveals the instability of these identities as well as the link between them. Before the visit from Social Services, which is part of her approval process as an adoptive parent, Nadja sews curtains to make her apartment look nice. Curtains and sewing are here framed as part of what is expected of her as a mother-to-be, which indicates that it is a kind of performance of normative femininity (Butler 1999). But, as Judith Butler argues, performing femininity will always fail to some extent, as there is no true or core femininity; rather, it is constructed through various iterations. In Nadja's case, femininity fails, as she is not particularly good at traditionally feminine handicrafts such as sewing and knitting but also because of the way she performs these skills. Her sewing and knitting are excessive; she makes loads of dresses of different sizes as well as pants, sweaters, and pillows in the shape of the whole Barbapapa family (Haag 2011, 18–19).7 The choice of the Barbapapa family further highlights excess; the family is (too) large, and the members threaten normativity as they constantly shift shapes and can morph into something unexpected. Maria Margareta Österholm (2012) argues that excessive femininity can be subversive, as it reveals the performative dimensions of femininity. Similarly, in Haag's novel, the iterations and the excess call attention to the constructed character of femininity but also of motherhood, as these identities are linked in Nadja's preparations for the adoption. Moreover, since femininity and motherhood are both revealed as constructions, the link between them is destabilized.

Still, even if the link between motherhood and femininity is criticized in Glaser's and Haag's novels, motherhood is connected to a normative life course. Glaser's Emma is depicted as someone who is invested in how she appears to others and in upholding a perfect façade, and her strivings to become a mother are sometimes framed as a means to fulfll norms. When she refects on why she wants a nuclear family so badly, she cannot fnd an

7The Barbapapa family appears in a series of children's picture books from the 1970s, created by the French-American couple Annette Tison and Talus Taylor.  Ski vacations to Sälen [a Swedish ski resort] and summer vacations to Greece and a house that she had designed herself. It was security, perhaps, or at least some kind of community" (Glaser 2010, 15).8 When Emma imagines what everybody else has, it is a normative, middle-class family life, and this life has the potential to create security and community. She also distances herself from other childless women in the online support groups she sometimes attends: "She didn't want to be one in a group of desperate women. She wanted to be successful" (Glaser 2010, 102).9 Being able to conceive is here linked to being a successful woman, which means performing normative femininity.

Over the course of the novel Emma's depression escalates, but the turning point comes when she realizes that she has to stop prioritizing the appearance of success over her own happiness. Since appearance and success have been linked to the ability to fulfll norms throughout the novel, this turn of events can be seen as a critique of these norms. The critique is also reinforced by the examples, discussed above, of how gendered norms restrict Emma's life. The representation of Emma shows how she is deeply impacted by these norms. Even if she is critical of the gendered structures that position Jimpa as a promising young man with a thriving career and her as a mother-to-be, she does not apply for a new job. Her solution to her career problems is to hope to become pregnant to be able to go on parental leave (Glaser 2010, 129). Despite her critique of the construction of the female body as either maternal or sexual, she adopts this view of herself and takes on the blame for her and Jimpa's failure in both areas. She hates her body after the fertility treatments have failed (Glaser 2010, 219), and she worries that the lack of love and affection between her and Jimpa is due to her not being sexy enough (Glaser 2010, 130).

Even in Haag's novel, which undermines the link between femininity and motherhood in the most forceful way, the impact of this construction is hard to escape for Nadja. Infertility is sometimes represented as incompatible with femininity, such as when Nadja frst fnds out about her inability to have children: "Sterile.  Childless.

8 "Hon ville ha man och barn och bil och kanske en liten hund. Skidsemestrar till Sälen och solsemestrar till Grekland och ett eget ritat hus. Det var trygghet kanske eller i alla fall någon sorts gemenskap."

9 "Hon ville inte vara en i en mängd desperata kvinnor. Hon ville vara lyckad."

Malfunctioning woman. Infertile" (Haag 2011, 8).10 Nadja is also, to some extent, faulted for being childless: her infertility is said to be caused by untreated chlamydia in her unruly teens (Haag 2011, 74), which suggests that she was not responsible enough to care for her future reproductive capacities.

On the one hand, Glaser's and Haag's novels critique gendered norms and structures and undermine the link between femininity and motherhood, but, on the other hand, motherhood is still placed at the center of a normative life course for women, especially in Glaser's novel. I have discussed how the critique of gendered structures can be read in light of the Swedish gender equality ideal, but the normative position of motherhood can also be situated in the Swedish context as part of Swedish pronatalism. The Swedish welfare state has not only facilitated for women the combination of professional and family life; infertile couples also have access to fertility treatments through the tax-funded health care system. This right was extended to lesbian couples in 2005 and to single women in 2016. Rikke Andreassen (2019, 85) has argued that non-normative families do not necessarily undermine traditional family ideals but, rather, extend those ideals to include new types of family members. I would argue that the same could be said of motherhood; as the Swedish state has granted reproductive rights to more groups, the normative position of motherhood is strengthened.

The normative positioning of motherhood is even more pronounced in Folkesson's novel, as motherhood becomes a way for the protagonist Tove to become "normal" and compensate for non-normative sexuality. Folkesson's novel does not challenge the link between femininity and motherhood to the same extent as Glaser's and Haag's, even if it sometimes questions concepts of what is natural. The idea of conception as natural is resisted, sometimes even explicitly, such as when Tove responds to Hanna's fear of people who think conception should happen "naturally" by pointing out that there is nothing natural—"everything has been created by us" (Folkesson 2019, 114).11 The idea of what is seen as natural is also problematized through the many connections between, on the one hand, Tove and Hanna's relationship and their struggle to become parents and, on the other hand, nature and farming, such as in a passage where it

10 "Steril. Vilket jävla ord. Barnlös. Icke fungerande kvinna. Ofruktsam."

11 "Allt har vi skapat."

is stated that "most cows are inseminated" (Folkesson 2019, 132).12 Nature imagery is also prominent in the depiction of the insemination, as when Tove lets her entire body "become big and wet like a feld, and the light inhale, the blue-white drop of life" (Folkesson 2019, 180).13 Connecting lesbianism to the natural world is a common trope in lesbian literature, and it serves to counter discourses of same-sex love as against nature (Bergdahl 2010; Björklund 2014).

However, while the discourse on lesbianism as against nature is challenged in Folkesson's novel, the idea of "the natural" as acceptable and "normal" is upheld. Several times Tove mentions the shame she feels about not being able to conceive without help (Folkesson 2019, 23, 44, 68), which frames this process as something that should happen within a very narrow defnition of "naturally." Similar normalizing strategies appear throughout the novel, such as the many connections to the Bible and Virgin Mary. The chapter when Tove and Hanna receive the letter from the hospital about their frst appointment contains several explicit references to the Annunciation, such as Mary, Joseph, and the archangel Gabriel, as well as verbatim quotes from the Bible. The recurring references to Mary highlight how an unconventional pregnancy where no man has been involved can still make the mother the symbol of all mothers and serves to normalize Tove's motherhood.14

Motherhood is also represented as a way for Tove to *become* "normal." She thinks about herself as deviant in relation to all the women who have lived on the farm: "But I just wanted to be normal. Give birth, like them. Care. Be a regular mother" (Folkesson 2019, 19).15 Motherhood even seems to compensate for non-normative sexuality, as Tove hopes that being pregnant will make her more familiar and easier to accept among her countryside neighbors (Folkesson 2019, 219). While motherhood is linked to normality, childlessness is connected to deviance. Tove refers to a story about a childless widow who used to live nearby and is said to haunt the neighborhood. Tove wonders whether the widow was a lunatic who failed to become pregnant and hopes that she herself will not end up like the widow (Folkesson 2019, 217–19). Tove's fear of childlessness is a

12 "De festa kor insemineras."

13 "bli stor och blöt som en åker, och den ljusa inandningen, blåvita droppen liv."

14 It also further strengthens the idea of motherhood as sacred, which is particularly interesting in relation to Sweden's status as one of the world's most secularized countries (Berggren and Trägårdh 2006, 383).

15 "Men jag ville bara vara normal. Föda, som de. Vårda. Vara en vanlig mor."

recurring theme in the novel, especially after the miscarriage; it is associated with shame (Folkesson 2019, 372), exclusion (Folkesson 2019, 395–96), and fear of not being able to carry on the family line (Folkesson 2019, 371). Parenthood is also connected to success; when comparing being a writer to being a parent, Tove concludes that being a parent is linked to higher status (Folkesson 2019, 357). Tove's struggle to become "normal" through having children frmly positions motherhood at the core of normativity.

The representations of femininity and non-motherhood in Glaser's, Haag's, and Folkesson's novels have to be read in the Swedish context, where family politics is closely tied to the gender equality ideal. While the novels sometimes explicitly critique gendered structures and the link between femininity and motherhood, thus becoming part of a Swedish gender equality discourse, they also, to various extents, reinstate motherhood at the core of femininity, in line with Swedish pronatalism.  Their partners are represented only from the women's point of view, which gives limited insight into their thoughts and feelings around infertility. The dominant position these novels give to the woman who gives birth further strengthens the link between femininity and motherhood.

# "I Want Children Too, but Together with Him": Nuclear Families and Heteronormative Temporality

The Swedish gender equality ideal, with its links to family politics and the dual-earner/dual-carer model, is intertwined with normative heterosexuality and the nuclear family norm (see, for instance, Björklund 2021; Dahl 2005). These norms are also tied to (hetero)normative temporality. Jack Halberstam (2005) argues that the Western world constructs respectability and normality according to "a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality" (4) based on "those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death" (2). For Halberstam, reproductive temporality is a heteronormative construction, but it still guides the way we are expected to lead our lives, what counts as a good life and the order the markers of life experiences should follow. Glaser's, Haag's, and Folkesson's novels depict involuntary childlessness, and as such, they represent a kind of stalled (hetero)normative temporality. The protagonists are stuck in time, waiting to move on with their lives and enter into a new life stage as mothers. The novels also disrupt the nuclear family ideal, since the protagonists are unable to reproduce. However, as I will show, the novels, to some extent, also confrm these ideals. In this section, I will discuss how the three novels relate to the nuclear family norm and the logics of (hetero)normative temporality.

Haag's novel, and to some extent Glaser's, explicitly resists the nuclear family norm. In Haag's novel, this norm is often supported by other characters, such as when a worker at the adoption agency, explaining the decline of Nadja's application, tells her that the adoption agency needs to think about what is best for the children: "now the child will go to a married couple instead, with both a mother and a father" (Haag 2011, 49).16 The nuclear family norm is also upheld through the recurring representations of childlessness as linked to loneliness and emptiness, such as when Nadja frst receives the bad news from the adoption agency: "I am 44 years old and childless. I will be alone for the rest of my life. In ffty years, I will be dead. In a hundred years, nobody will know that I have even existed" (Haag 2011, 55; see also 44–46, 71, 144).17 However, while the nuclear family often is referred to explicitly as the best way to lead one's life, such as in the example at the adoption agency above, it is represented in a less rosy light. This is sometimes done through comedic contrasts. Nadja's mother constantly nags Nadja because she is single and childless and compares her to her sister Lotta, who got married early and had three children. She tells Nadja how happy Lotta is and how Lotta knows "how to have a REALLY GOOD LIFE!" (Haag 2011, 25).18 In the chapter that follows, Lotta is introduced for the frst time, and it turns out that her life is not as great as their mother portrays it; her marriage is unhappy, and Lotta is in charge of all the unpaid household work: the house, the children, and her father-in-law, who orders her around and complains about everything. Nadja and Lotta's mother is represented as a comical stereotype who literally speaks in capitals when delivering her "truths" about what a good life entails, and the contrast between the fawless façade she tries to uphold and Lotta's unhappy nuclear family life creates a comedic effect and

16 "nu får ju barnet komma till ett gift par istället, med både en mamma och en pappa."

17 "Jag är 44 år och barnlös. Jag kommer att leva ensam i resten av mitt liv. Om femtio år är jag död. Om hundra år är det ingen som vet att jag ens har levat."

18 "hur man ska ordna ett RIKTIGT BRA LIV!"

suggests that having husbands and children may not make women happy after all.

The nuclear family norm is also resisted through contrasts between the novel's representations of nuclear families and other relationships. There are very few representations of happy nuclear families in the novel. Lotta and her husband travel to Paris to save their marriage, but start fghting again shortly after their return. Nadja and Lotta have a complicated relationship with their mother, and the novel does not mention their father. Nadja's best friend Katti is divorced and has shared custody of her children. However, other relationships are represented as more resilient. Nadja's relationship with Katti is depicted as closer than any of the more conventional family bonds in the novel. When Katti hears that Nadja will not be able to adopt, she is in a TV studio recording a show, but she fakes food poisoning in order to support her friend. She encourages Nadja to fnd someone to marry and runs Nadja's sound studio while she is away. Katti appears more reliable than any of Nadja's family members, and the representation of Nadja and Katti's relationship thus counters Nadja's fear of having a lonely childless life. The novel also represents the bond between Lotta's father-in-law Sigvard and Jocke as close and loving, and when Nadja develops a relationship with both of them, the three form a kind of family bond even if neither one of them is (genetically) related.

Nadja's relationship with Katti and her relationship with Jocke and Sigvard come across as happier and more stable than the nuclear families depicted in the novel. Moreover, children are rarely represented, and when they are, they are mostly depicted as annoying. Also, when Nadja falls in love with Jocke, the love for Jocke rather than reproduction becomes her priority. She even turns down two marriage proposals to be with him; she declines Sigvard's offer to marry her when Jocke has left and turns down the man whom Lotta originally set her up with and who appears at the doorstep when Nadja has fallen in love with Jocke but before they decide to get married. In a phone call Katti asks Nadja if she has given up on having a child, and Nadja responds, "No, but what's most important right now is Jocke. I want to be with him. Whether we have children or not, we'll see, but in that case, we will adopt together. I want Jocke. I want children too, but together with him" (Haag 2011, 235).19 Jocke also

19 "Nej, men det viktigaste av allt just nu är faktiskt Jocke. Jag vill vara med honom. Om det blir barn eller inte får vi se, men i såna fall ska vi adoptera det tillsammans. Jag vill ha Jocke. Barn vill jag också ha, men då tillsammans med honom."

chooses Nadja over reproduction; when she tells him she is infertile before they get married at the end of the novel, he responds that it is okay since they have reindeer.20 Nadja and Jocke do not have children at the end of the novel, though Nadja receives a letter from the adoption agency on the last page.

The ending of Glaser's novel challenges the nuclear family norm in a similar way. Emma and Jimpa have a conversation where Jimpa admits that he, too, grieves their inability to have children, and at the end of the novel their relationship is better than ever. Even though they acknowledge that they both want to have children, they do not make any concrete plans for new fertility treatments, and the novel ends with the restored intimacy between Emma and Jimpa, which reinforces something Jimpa has said earlier in the novel: "We are already a family. We do not need a child to prove that" (Glaser 2010, 204).21 Thus, the novel's ending showcases other ways of being a complete family and highlights Emma's happiness with this family constellation.

Similar to Haag's, Folkesson's novel challenges the nuclear family norm by representing other ways of organizing close relationships. Tove resists the idea of the nuclear family as the only way to happiness and community, like when she thinks about her uncle Arne who is not alone even if he had led his adult life without a nuclear family of his own (Folkesson 2019, 41). The novel also sets up an alternative to the nuclear family: Tove, Hanna, the grandmother, and Arne form a kind of family, and they care for each other. When Arne needs to go to the hospital for cancer treatment, Tove takes him, and Tove and Hanna care for grandmother and the farm while he is away. Arne, who is a hunter, makes sure Tove and Hanna have a supply of meat. When they all have tea together in grandmother's kitchen, Tove refers to them as a family: "Grandmother looks so happy because we will stick together when she dies. A strange little family consisting of two + uncle + dog" (Folkesson 2019, 99).22 Here the dog is also included in the family, and while grandmother is not, since she will soon die, she is part of the community in the present.

At frst glance, Folkesson's novel also challenges heteronormativity by representing a lesbian couple. As mentioned above, lesbian couples have

20 Jocke belongs to the indigenous Sámi population and owns reindeer.

21 "Vi är redan en familj. Det behöver vi väl inte ett barn för att bevisa."

22 "Mormor ser så glad ut för att vi håller ihop, när hon ska dö. En liten märklig familj om två + morbror + hund."

had access to assisted reproduction in the tax-funded Swedish health care system since 2005, and, similar to gender equality, a progressive attitude about LGBTQI+ issues can be seen as a kind of Swedish-branded value. However, as Ulrika Dahl (2018) argues, only a particular kind of lesbian mother fgure is accepted and celebrated in the Swedish context: "Cast in white cis-gendered femininity, this fgure is entangled in homonationalist ideas about gender equality and sexual exceptionalism that extend rather than challenge heteronormative white middle-class kinship ideals" (1034). The concept of homonationalism was coined by Jasbir K. Puar (2017), who builds on Lisa Duggan's term homonormativity, which refers to a neoliberal gay politics which rests on domesticity and consumption and does not challenge heteronormativity, but instead maintains and supports it. Puar uses homonationalism to describe how sexual exceptionalism is linked to the nation and regulates who is excluded from the national imaginary: "this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects. There is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness" (2).

Folkesson's novel reproduces homonationalism by depicting how Tove and Hanna, as a white, cis-gendered, middle-class couple, can take advantage of Sweden's lesbian-inclusive reproductive laws and by linking sexual exceptionalism to Swedish whiteness. As discussed above, the novel's use of nature imagery counters the discourse of lesbianism as against nature, but, at the same time, the positioning of Tove and Hanna and their reproductive process in a traditional Swedish farming landscape reinforces homonationalist ideas of Swedishness, visible also in other cultural representations of white Swedish lesbian couples (Dahl 2018). The connection to Swedishness and whiteness is underscored in other passages, such as when Tove thinks about the child she will have as being legitimized by the state (Folkesson 2019, 204) or when it is stated, repeatedly, that the donor will be a nice guy, a Swede with blue eyes (Folkesson 2019, 125, 173–74, 176), and these passages also link sexual exceptionalism to the nation and Swedish pronatalism. Moreover, Tove's struggle to become "normal" through having children, discussed in the previous section, does not really challenge heteronormativity but, rather, supports it. As such, the novel reproduces and extends certain "heteronormative white middle-class kinship ideals" (Dahl 2018, 1034), but it can also be said to reinforce (hetero)normative temporality, as parenthood is represented as key to a normative life course.

Glaser's and Haag's novels, which also depict white, middle-class protagonists, reproduce (hetero)normative temporality in a more forceful way, as they position reproduction within a heterosexual framework. At one point in Glaser's novel Jimpa tells Emma that he wants to stop trying to have children, and she considers leaving him to increase her chances of becoming a mother (Glaser 2010, 64, 119).23 But for Emma the heterosexual relationship and children are linked; she wants Jimpa and her to fght together to have a family (Glaser 2010, 64). Emma learns to be content with her relationship instead of leaving Jimpa to pursue motherhood on her own, which confrms (hetero)normative temporality, according to which reproduction should not happen out of coupledom. Similarly, instead of pursuing motherhood on her own, Haag's Nadja focuses on getting married and fnding a father for her future children. The ending of Haag's novel can be read in the Scandinavian context where the dualearner/dual-carer and involved fatherhood ideals are prevalent and where research shows how single motherhood by choice is seen as a Plan B when women have been unable to fnd a man (Andreassen 2019, 66, 93; Bodin et al. 2021; Henriksson and Bergnehr 2021). Both Glaser's Emma and Haag's Nadja choose the prospect of reproduction within a heterosexual framework over pursuing single motherhood, thus reinforcing Swedish family norms as well as (hetero)normative temporality.

In many ways Glaser's, Haag's, and Folkesson's novels undermine the nuclear family ideal; they critique it and represent alternatives. Moreover, none of the novels ends with children or even a pregnancy, which disrupts the nuclear family ideal and (hetero)normative temporality. At the same time, by positioning motherhood as key to a normative life course and reproduction within a heteronormative framework, they also reproduce these ideals.

# Conclusion: Challenging the Miracle-Baby-inthe-End Narrative

Glaser's, Haag's, and Folkesson's novels represent involuntary childlessness from three different perspectives—one protagonist is in a heterosexual relationship, one is single, and one is a lesbian. The books also belong to different genres; Glaser's and Haag's novels are popular literature,

23The reader is never informed of the medical reason for the couple's infertility, and Emma considers leaving Jimpa because he retreats from their struggle to have children.

while Folkesson's is critically acclaimed (auto)fction. Despite the differences in perspective and genre, these novels represent involuntary childlessness in similar ways. They all focus on white, middle-class protagonists, and they all reinforce and challenge norms around femininity and reproduction, as they are conceptualized in the Swedish context.

On the one hand, these representations of non-motherhood illustrate the centrality of motherhood to normative femininity; infertility makes Glaser's Emma and Haag's Nadja feel like malfunctioning women, and Folkesson's Tove hopes that motherhood will make her "normal" and compensate for her non-normative sexuality. The link between motherhood and femininity is, of course, not a Swedish phenomenon, but it takes particular shape in the Swedish context where pronatalist measures date long back and have facilitated motherhood for women, contributing to a kind of mandatory motherhood (Björklund 2021). The novels also represent motherhood as intertwined with heteronormativity; Emma and Nadja choose heterosexual coupledom over pursuing motherhood on their own, and all three novels reinforce heteronormative temporalities by positioning motherhood within the nuclear family and as key to a normative life course.

On the other hand, the novels also resist norms around femininity and reproduction, at least to some extent. In Glaser's novel Emma is critical of the gender structures that both give Jimpa a more promising career and frame parenthood as key to adult femininity but not to adult masculinity. Haag's novel challenges normative femininity by highlighting its performative character through excess and humor, and it resists the normative position of the nuclear family by portraying it as a failing project. Folkesson's and Haag's novels also provide alternatives to the nuclear family: friendships and cross-species families.

However, the novels' most radical and norm-breaking dimension is the fact that none of them ends with children or even a pregnancy. In Glaser's novel Jimpa tells Emma that they do not need a child to prove that they are a family, and even though they both want children when the novel ends, they are not making any plans for new fertility treatments. In Haag's novel Jocke and Nadja do not have children at the end of the novel, and it is unclear what the future holds for them; the last sentence of the novel describes a letter that arrives from the adoption agency, but the novel ends before it is opened. Jocke's response to Nadja also indicates that he is just as happy with a cross-species family consisting of him, Nadja and reindeer. In Folkesson's novel Tove and Hanna plan to continue the fertility treatments, but Tove is not pregnant at the end of the novel. The process around the fertility treatments, including the miscarriage, is depicted in great detail—from the frst blood streaks on the toilet paper to the lumps coming out of Tove's vagina. These details together with the fact that the novel does not end with a baby or a pregnancy suggest that experiences of failed fertility treatments can be represented in their own right and not only as steps toward a happy ending.

The letter from the adoption agency in Haag's novel can, of course, be interpreted as an indication of a child-to-be, and in Folkesson's novel, Tove and Hanna will continue trying for a baby. Folkesson's novel is also the frst volume of a trilogy in progress, and the second volume (Folkesson 2021) depicts a successful fertility treatment, pregnancy, and the birth of a child. Still, there are no children or pregnancies at the end of these novels. We do not know what the letter from the adoption agency says, and Tove never gets pregnant in Folkesson's frst novel. The representations of infertility in the three novels studied thus provide a different picture than the one Rebecca Feasey (2019) has identifed in mainstream media: the miracle-baby-in-the-end narrative. Instead, these novels offer narratives that break with the conventional infertility plot line and frame the struggle to become a mother as a story that can be told in its own right. As such they widen the representational space for infertility and non-motherhood.

**Acknowledgments** I am very grateful to those who have given valuable feedback on earlier versions of this text: Maja Bodin as well as the editors of and contributors to this volume, especially those who served as assigned readers at a workshop, Margaretha Fahlgren and Valerie Heffernan. I am also greatly indebted to my line editor Rebecca Ahlfeldt.

# References

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# Orality/Aurality and Voice of the Voiceless Mother in Abla Farhoud's *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail*

# *Egl*e *Ka* ̇ c*kut* ̌ ė

First-person narratives of mothering written from the perspective of monolingual migrant mothers who almost exclusively speak their own native language to their children are exceptionally few.1 The novel

© The Author(s) 2023

This publication has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952366, and from the Centre for Gender Research and the Department of Literature at Uppsala University.

1 I refer here to Gill Rye's defnition of narratives of mothering: "Literary texts where the mother is herself either the frst-person narrative subject or, in the frst-person narratives, the fgure whose point of view is paramount" (2009, 17).

E. Kackute ̌ (̇ \*)

Department of French Philology, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
H. Wahlström Henriksson et al. (eds.), *Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing*, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17211-3\_5

*Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* (1998) (*Le bonheur a la queue glissante*)2 by the Canadian Quebecois author of Lebanese origin, Abla Farhoud, is a remarkable and rare example. The novel is an important part of the Quebecois literature and one of the key texts of migrant writing in Quebec. As such, it has been widely researched and interpreted through the lens of *écriture migrante,* 3 as a rich and valuable refection on the issues of immigrant identity, belonging, transculturality, and mobility especially from the feminist point of view. This chapter reads the novel in light of critical motherhood studies and feminist philosophy as an exploration of what it means to mother in a language that is perceived as foreign by one's children and the community one lives in; what it means to mother in a country the language of which one does not speak and whose social and cultural norms one does not fully understand. One of the most important objectives of this chapter is to theorise the formal literary narrative representation of the voice of a seemingly voiceless migrant mother who is silent in the language of the host country.

To do this, I will use Marianne Hirsch's classic notion of the mother/ daughter plot (1989) together with Adriana Cavarero's concept of the double voice that stems from her feminist rereading of the history of philosophy. Cavarero maintains that metaphysics "insists on *what* is Said and never asks after *who* is Saying" (2005, 29), thus privileging mind over body, *semantike* (meaning) over *phone* (voice or sound), and devocalising the *Logos* (word, thought, or speech). As a critique of metaphysics, she uncovers an alternative philosophical and cultural history that focusses on the embodied oral aspects of the saying, on the musicality and the pleasure of speaking, the specifcity of each individual voice, and the relationality of the speaker and the listener. Speaking, Cavarero claims, is a fundamentally relational act. Speech fails if there is no one to listen and to respond: "It takes at least a duet, a calling and a responding—or, better, a reciprocal intention to listen, one that is already active in the vocal emission, and that reveals and communicates everyone to the other" (5). Finally, Cavarero

2Having won a very important France-Québec-Philippe Rossillon literary prize at its publication in 1998 and the France-Quebec Literary Prize in 1999, it went on to become an international best seller and enjoys a positive academic reception. Unless indicated otherwise, translations of quotations are mine.

3*Écriture migrante* is a literary phenomenon that emerged in Quebec in the 1980s. It is fction written by authors born abroad that "is defned by themes related to displacement and hybridity as well as to forms, often tinged with autobiography" ("qui se défnit par des thèmes liés au déplacement et à l'hybridité et par des formes particulières, souvent teintées d'autobiographie." Chartier 2002, 305).

locates the uniqueness of every human being in their embodied voice and posits the supremacy of *phone* over *semantike* or the vocality of discourse over its content. She traces that tradition back to Homer, the blind poet, who relies on the muses as a source to his poetry and to the entire oral culture of *epos*. I will apply this theory to read a novel written in French by an author whose frst language is Arabic and in which the oral aspect of language, the voice of the mother, is important both structurally and symbolically.

# Dounia's Story

The novel *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* tells the story of an illiterate Lebanese migrant woman, Dounia, who is seventy-fve years old at the time of the narrative and mother to six children, fve of whom are born in Lebanon and one in Montréal. Dounia is born and grows up in Lebanon, in the village Chaghour. She loses her mother as a young child and as a teenager marries her now husband, Salim, whom she found lovable at the time and who, she believes, must have loved her (Farhoud 1998, 43). Leaving Chaghour at the age of seventeen to get married in another village several kilometres away feels like emigration to her (43), and she spends the twelve years in her new home "perceived and feeling as 'a stranger'" (Dahab, 110). It is in that village that she frst suffers domestic violence at the hands of her husband Salim. Summoned by her husband, who had emigrated two years previously, Dounia frst relocates to Montreal as a young wife and mother of fve: Abdallah aged twelve; Samira, Farid, Samir, and Myriam aged four. She is reluctant to go as she rather enjoys life in Lebanon, looking after her children and sustaining the family with the money Salim sends her from Montreal. Salim runs a corner shop in Montreal while living with his estranged mother. After a ten-year stint in Montreal during which Dounia survives a post-partum depression and sees most of her children become adults, she follows her husband to Lebanon for a few years, where she suffers from a reverse culture shock before being forced back to Canada by the civil war. Illiterate and subject to the patriarchal family law that makes social interactions diffcult, Dounia never learns French or English. Apart from a few words and broken phrases in French she uses to communicate with her grandchildren, she spends her life in social isolation, cooking and looking after her family. "I don't know how to speak," says Dounia at the beginning of the novel. "I leave it to Salim. I know how to feed people" (Dahab 2003, 50).4 With these words the narrator establishes the premises of Dounia's subjectivity—the subjectivity of someone who lives her entire life through others, in utter lack of social agency. Lacking the linguistic means herself, Dounia entrusts her life story to her daughter, Myriam, who writes it in the frst person but through Dounia's point of view.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the novel has been read along two conficting interpretive lines: frst, as a story of non-belonging, marginalisation, isolation, lack of subjectivity, and lack of voice (Miraglia 2005; Montandon 2006; Dahab 2009; Maddox 2010; Pruteanu 2012, 2016); second, as a story of subject development and fnding or being given a voice. The frst interpretive trend is much louder and more pronounced. For example, for Pruteanu, Dounia's (2016) "principal traits of character are her profound silence and resignation" (3) and the only power Dounia maintains is the power she exerts in the kitchen. Elizabeth F. Dahab (2009) frames the narrative as the tale of the mother's solitude and abandonment as well as the story of her loss of voice. The second interpretive trend focusses on ways in which the novel resists Dounia's subjection to silence and social insignifcance. Anne Marie Miraglia, for example, claims that although the novel highlights the diffculties of social, cultural, and linguistic integration of migrants in Canada, it also demonstrates that while socially marginalised, Dounia is actually well integrated in the affective family structure. Kate Averis (2017) reads the novel as a story of ongoing self-development, mobility, and transmission. She argues that the home that Dounia reconstructs for herself in Quebec around her children becomes a site of subjective growth for her and her children. Finally, Allison Connolly posits that "[w]hile Dounia was not able to overcome the barriers to integration, her children were" (2017, 41) suggesting that Dounia's children's social success is largely, if not exclusively, due to her mothering.

The one thing all scholars agree about is that the mother-daughter relationship in the novel and the problem of the mother's voice are its central concerns. The dominating view in Farhoud scholarship seems to be that "Myriam desires to give her mother a voice by telling the story of her life" (Connolly 2017, 59). Thus, by the end of the novel Dounia emerges as a "speaking subject" (Pruteanu 2016, 4) whose voice has fnally been heard, thanks to her daughter's writing talent. In short, the consensus seems to be that it is the daughter, Myriam, who gives Dounia a voice, thus endowing her with subjectivity.

4Translated from French by Jill McDougall.

In this chapter I take issue with this view, arguing that Dounia's story is written in more than one voice, to use Cavarero's expression. I will pick up the interpretive thread laid out by Pruteanu (2012) and Connolly (2017) who both briefy suggest that the novel is at least to some capacity written in Dounia's own voice.

# The Mother's Book

*Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* has an important autobiographical dimension. Farhoud has gone on record saying that the initial chosen title of the novel was going to be *My Mother's Book* further elaborating that the reason why she took up the pen at all was that her mother couldn't (Farhoud quoted by Dahab 2003, 108). Before delving into the textual analysis of the novel, it is important to sketch the story of Farhoud's life that will establish the background of the mother-daughter relationships the novel explores.

Abla Farhoud was born in Lebanon in 1945. She moved to Quebec with her family when she was six in 1951 and attended school in the outskirts of Montreal where her father kept a family store. She was forced to withdraw from high school to help with the store (without pay) so that the family could save enough money to go back to Lebanon, which Farhoud experienced as a deeply gendered injustice (Wimbush 2021). Nevertheless, alongside the heavy duty to her family, she took courses in dramatic art and worked as an actor and speaker for Radio Québec. In 1965, the Farhoud family returned to live in Beirut where Abla worked as a researcher and actor for Radio Lebanon. Talking of her experience of return migration, she remembered feeling appalled by gender inequality in Lebanon where according to her the relationship between the sexes consisted of a battle in which women were always the losers (Delisle and Tézine 2018). In 1969, at the age of twenty, Farhoud left Lebanon for good, this time for Paris where she studied theatre at the Sorbonne. She met her husband, the Quebecois musician, Vincent Dionne, in Paris and returned to Montreal in 1973. Ten years later, while completing an MA in Theatre Arts, Farhoud began to write plays, a shift that she described as a "need to be heard rather than seen" (MacDougall 1999). Listening and speaking as opposed to looking and/or being looked at thus emerge as important concerns for Farhoud as a person and a writer. Since 1973 Farhoud lived and worked in Montreal where she died in 2021.

Arabic is Farhoud's mother tongue in which she was fuent but not fully literate and she called French, the language of writing, her "langue maîtresse" (Delisle and Tézine 2018), her lover language that she had chosen out of love and in an act of cultural transgression. However, Arabic was the language in which her lifelong relationship with her parents and with her mother in particular happened. It is also the language that nurtured her literary ear. Furthermore, Arab culture is "a culture of orality that has shaped Dounia's world, that oral Arabic wisdom that is a world of strong images, poetry, full of swift ellipses and which is set against the modernity of contemporary America" (Montandon 84).5 The Arabic oral culture that shaped Dounia's world at least partly shaped Farhoud's literary imaginary and her linguistic sensibilities too. She would have heard her mother use Lebanese expressions and proverbs—traditional ones that are part of the collective culture and probably some that are attributable to her only. Therefore, setting out to write her mother's story, Farhoud likely thought back to and heard her mother's voice in Arabic in her head which she then undertook to translate into literary French or rather Quebecois.

Moreover, the novel *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* was inspired by Farhoud's childhood memory of watching her mother cry while washing dishes in a Montreal kitchen soon after their arrival to Canada (Delisle and Tézine 2018).6 As Dahab rightly observes, however, the novel "belongs to the realm of fction despite the transposition of some of the mother's account […] mirrored in the *mise en abyme* framework of the novel itself" (108). The autobiographical element of *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* featuring Farhoud's mother and the fctional character of the work that gives the mother's narrative the frst-person perspective makes this text an interesting iteration of the mother/daughter plot as theorized by Marianne Hirsch (1989).

5 "Une culture de l'oralité qui a façonné avec toute sa poésie et sa force le monde de Dounia, cette sagesse arabe orale qui est un monde fortement imagé, poétique, plein de raccourcis fulgurants et qui s'oppose […] à la modernité de l'Amérique contemporaine."

6There is a fctionalised account of that episode in the novel told from the mother's point of view.

# The Mother/Daughter Plot and Migrant Women's Writing

In her ground-breaking study *The Mother/Daughter Plot* Hirsch posits that the maternal voice in Western culture has been silenced by both patriarchal and some feminist discourses. Hirsch defnes the said plot as a story of the subject development and pays especially close attention to the mothers' roles in the stories of daughters' development and to the roles of daughters in stories of mothers' themselves. According to Hirsch, neither mothers nor daughters can do justice to each other's perspectives. When mothers' stories are told by daughters, the mothers are partially silenced and marginalised because what is voiced, is only the mothers' discourse, her story, rather than her full-blown subjectivity and uniqueness. When mothers speak for both themselves and their daughters, they remain objects in their daughters' process of subject-formation. (12) What Hirsch would ideally like to witness in a mother/daughter plot is "mothers and daughters speaking to each other" (8) as two separate, yet deeply connected subjects.

She identifes the black feminist romance as the literary tradition that comes close to achieving this because it is a tradition in which mothers and daughters speak to each other on the grounds of the "racist and sexist oppression which they share" (178). I suggest that in the context of migrant women's writing, mothers and daughters share similar concerns. Oftentimes, mothers and daughters represented in fctions of migration both suffer marginalisation due to their race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Similarly, they are often both victims of oppressive patriarchal familial structures (albeit to different degrees). In Farhoud's case, for example, she has expressed dismay at being classed as an immigrant author in Quebec despite only ever writing in French and publishing exclusively in Quebec (Zesseu 2015, 17). As previously mentioned, both her mother and she suffered from sexist oppression from Farhoud's father and the Lebanese gender culture more broadly. Farhoud's novel thus shares many traits with the black feminist romance as defned by Hirsch. Using *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* as a prime example, I suggest that migrant women's writing relies on the "maternal oral tradition of the past" (197), mothers' and daughters' lives are represented as "intertwined with each other" (178), the mothers and daughters do speak to each other, their conversation is anchored in their shared experience of systematic injustice and marginalisation, and mothers speak in two voices, as individual subjects and as mothers (181). In what follows I will demonstrate that in terms of literary representation of the mother's voice, the orality of the mother's voice shines through in the daughter's narrative, the frst-person narrative gives Dounia a strong voice, an independent subjectivity, and makes it possible to articulate her mothering experience, especially mothering across the language barrier.

In *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* Dounia addresses the reader in the frst-person singular and "narrates her life to her daughter, Myriam, a prolifc writer who realizes that though she has written ffteen books so far, not a single one features her mother. Myriam proceeds to fll this gap in what becomes a project of self-revelation" (Dahab, 108).7 Thus, the novel stages the subject-formation of the mother. However, the daughter, whom we know to be a fctionalised version of Farhoud, features not only as the enabler in the storytelling but also as a product of Dounia's monolingual mothering. In that sense, the novel stages the mother/daughter plot featuring an imagined conversation between a mother and a daughter who are both fully subjects. The narrative voice in the novel is always that of the mother. However, the narrative perspective is that of the daughter (Farhoud herself) and it is precisely this double dimension that makes the maternal perspective legible to contemporary Western readers. However, Dounia's children, including Myriam, are only represented through Dounia's eyes and with her words putting the mother, the maternal experience, and the voice of the mother centre stage. In this respect, in contrast to Hirsch's suggestion, the daughter functions as an object in the mother's story and maternal subject formation. This narrative device puts the novel *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* into the category of *matrifocal narratives of migrant mothering*, the genre that tells us most intimately about migrant "mothers' own desires, fears and anxieties, fantasies and imaginative concepts of mothering" (Rye 2009, 3).8

Structurally and in terms of the plot, the production of the novel—the oral nature of Dounia's storytelling in Arabic and her daughter's writing it in French—constitutes the essence of the novel. Dounia's and Myriam's lives are represented as intertwined and interdependent. Dounia is loved

7There is one brief exception to this when at the end of the novel the narrator Dounia refers to herself in the third person in an attempt to represent the complicated self-relations of a person affected by old age-related memory loss.

8 I coin the term matrifocal narratives of migrant mothering based on Rye's concept of "narratives of mothering" (2009, 17) and Podnieks' and O'Reilly's notion of "matrifocal narratives" (Podnieks and O'Reilly 2010: 3).

and valued in Myriam's house. Myriam's children call her *sitto,* which is an affectionate term for grandmother in Arabic and make her feel like the queen mother. Dounia has exclusive rights at Myriam's house—nobody else is allowed to enter Myriam's study while she writes. Dounia, on the other hand, knows to not overstep the boundaries, she observes her daughter in silence, occasionally serving her coffee, tidying the house, mending children's clothes—in short—creating a favourable environment for her to work in and facilitating her creative work. There are further parallels between their lives. Neither of their marriages has been successful—Myriam is recently divorced, while Dounia has been a victim of domestic abuse all her life. Besides, both women are taciturn, pensive, and observant.

Through the intertwining of the mother and daughter characters, "the fusion or confusion" (Hirsch, 1989, 185) of generations occurs. When Dounia watches her daughter work, she sometimes observes Myriam cry and thinks back to herself crying while washing dishes all those years ago, while observed by young Myriam. This in turn makes her think of her own mother who, like Dounia, could not read or write. Having established the transgenerational gendered connection, the novel is quick to introduce the separation between them as a mark of their respective subjectivity. The most pronounced difference being that Myriam, of course, is empowered by her ability to read and write. This is the underlying reason behind Dounia's and Myriam's different behaviour in the face of their broken marriages: Dounia endures and suffers in silence, while Myriam ends the marriage and carries on with her life.

# A Migrant Mother's Story in More than One Voice

The most important connection and separation of the two women in the novel lies in their linguistic relationship to one another and to language more broadly. They share their mother tongue, Arabic, which is an oral language for them both: in Dounia's case because she is illiterate, and in Myriam's because she emigrated from Lebanon at the age of four and was schooled in French. Dounia refects on her linguistic relationship with her daughter: "We both have the same mother tongue, but what with the years she spent learning another language. Myriam lived most of her life here" (24).9 She recognises that her daughter's linguistic identity is different to hers in two ways. Dounia can only really speak Arabic, whereas Myriam is fuent in French as well as Arabic, and she has also mastered another aspect of language altogether, the written as well as well-spoken French. Cavarero explains that the oral and the written language abide by different organising principles, that speech belongs to the sphere of the ear, whereas writing to the sphere of the eye. The sphere of the ear also comprises the vocal aspect of language, which is sonorous, musical, dynamic, and physical. In contrast, the written language, according to Cavarero, "translates sound and eliminates it" (82). Based on this reasoning, Dounia's linguistic life is that of the ear, whereas Myriam's linguistic self relies more on the sphere of the eye. Her practice as a writer consists of transcribing Dounia's voice into a written system of signifcation. Nevertheless, Myriam has been initiated into and has some access to her mother's vocal linguistic sensibility.

When Myriam announces to Dounia that she wishes to write a book about her, Dounia accepts the invitation to tell her daughter her story, makes herself comfortable in a rocking chair in Myriam's offce, and the diffcult process of telling and listening gets underway. The link between Dounia's telling of the story and remembering the details of her past is in line with her belonging to the oral tradition in which the physical production of speech participates in the production of meaning. This is how Dounia experiences her talking sessions with Myriam:

Every word seems to be important. I can speak as much as I like, without being afraid to make a mistake. With her, my tongue seems to untie itself, my chest breathes better. With others, I can't wait to get to the end of what I am saying, and they can't either. They are right, I am not good with words. With Myriam, I seem to be a different person. (24)10

Myriam opens up the space for Dounia where she can engage in the physical act of speaking, in the way of using the organs of speech not only to emit sounds but also to think, to make sense of the story of her life that

9Nous avons toutes les deux la même langue maternelle, mais que d'années passées à étudier une autre langue. Myriam a vécu presque toute sa vie ici.

10Chaque mot a l'air important. Je peux parler autant que je veux, sans peur de me tromper. Avec elle, on dirait que ma langue se délie, que ma poitrine respire mieux. Avec les autres, j'ai toujours hâte d'arriver à la fn et eux aussi. Ils ont raison, je ne sais pas bien parler. Avec Myriam, on dirait que je suis une autre personne.

she is telling. According to Cavarero, "before the advent of metaphysics, it was more natural to believe that thought was a product of the lungs" (62). Similarly, Dounia seems to be using her breathing to comprehend her experience. By engaging in the physicality of her voice, supported with the rhythm and the physicality of a rocking chair, the content of her existence unravels itself. This is also because, rather than listening to the bare linguistic meaning of what she is saying like the others, Myriam listens to Dounia's voice, to the locus of her uniqueness letting Dounia communicate herself to Myriam. As a result, Dounia becomes a different person, from a one-dimensional, ignorant, submissive, and abused woman, she emerges as a fully rounded, complex individual who went through existence making decisions, processing disappointments, considering options, choosing some things over others, and taking responsibility for who she has become.

Since the Homeric epic tradition explored by Cavarero uses sound and rhythms to remember the stories that are being told, it is only natural that Dounia's narrative should culminate in the resurfacing of her traumatic memory from Lebanon. When heavily pregnant Dounia asks Salim to not go away on a business trip as planned but to stay with her for the birth. In response, Salim, already on horseback, kicks her in her face in the presence of her father and children. Furthermore, rather than defending her, Dounia's father takes Salim's side and looks away in silence. The episode is narratively framed as Dounia's internal narrative, prefaced by the elocution: "There are some things you can't say, that should never be spoken to yourself, that should be banished from your thoughts" (Dahab 2003, 61–62). Dounia confesses that her frst impulse is to leave Salim, but she then lays out two reasons—one emotional, one practical—as to why she did not. First, leaving Salim would have involved condemning her father to public humiliation due to her violating the patriarchal social order in which they were both steeped. Second, she has nowhere to go, has caring responsibilities, and, considering she is about to give birth, is highly vulnerable. The narrative continues with Dounia expressing painful remorse over not taking action then or later and thus exposing not only herself but her children to continuous domestic violence that has resulted in her eldest son's, Abdallah's, mental illness and her other two sons' delinquency.11

11The scope of this chapter does not allow me to interpret this episode in the light of feminist thinking related to gender-based violence.

Feminist criticism to date tends to read this episode as a sign of Dounia's submissiveness and failure as a woman and a mother. Such readings are predicated on the failure of the maternal narrative voice to discursively transgress the patriarchal law by denouncing it (Miraglia 2005; Dahab 2009). However, the perspective of motherhood studies puts a different spin on this. A careful reading of the novel reveals that the remorse and maternal guilt have been brought about by Myriam's response to Dounia's experience, as illustrated by the following quotation in which Dounia says: "When she picks up on what I've just said with: 'yes, but … you could have … if you wanted to', I see that she cannot put herself in my shoes" (126).12 It thus becomes clear that Dounia only starts blaming herself because of her interaction with Myriam who, steeped in Western feminism, brought up in a society in which services for gender violence victims exist, but who is also a victim of her mother's failure to stand up to genderbased violence, fnds it hard to justify Dounia's behaviour. Maternal guilt and shame are represented through the narrative technique of rhetorical questions the readers guess the answers to (Montandon 2006, 85): "Where could I run? Where could I escape? Where could I go? If my father scorned me and looked the other way, where could I go? […] Even today, ffty years later, I ask myself why did I not fee, why did I do nothing?" (Dahab 2003, 63). The reader is thus made to realise the impossibility of the task of leaving Salim. Furthermore, the reader is also aware that the novel in which Dounia has the power of the frst-person narrative voice is written by Myriam whose emancipated point of view the Western reader identifes with. Contemporary motherhood theory tells us that the culture of blaming mothers for the shortcomings of their mothering, thus making mothers blame themselves, is itself part of the patriarchal ideology (Rose 2018; Phoenix 2011). This novel breaks away from the dominant paradigm of mother blaming in migrant women's writing of the 1970s and 1980s in which migrant mothers' stories were usually told by their writer daughters and through the daughters' narrative voices (Ho 1999). By framing maternal guilt as a cultural and generational difference between the mother and the daughter from the mother's point of view, the novel achieves a more authentic representation of the silent migrant mother's subjectivity. Therefore, as a narrative, the novel takes a sympathetic view towards the mother.

12 "Quand elle reprend ce que je viens de dire en y ajoutant: 'Oui, mais … tu aurais pu … si tu avais voulu', je vois bien qu'elle ne peut pas se mettre à ma place."

# The Power of the Muse

The creative collaboration between Dounia and Myriam can be likened to that of a writer and her Muse. In her analysis of Homer's relationship to the Muse, Cavarero explains that Homer functions as a flter between the goddess and the listeners and attributes Homer's power to enchant the audience with his narrative poetry to the workings of the Muse. She claims that Homer "is the only one who can translate the vocality and the omniscience of the Muse into a narrating song" (114). Similarly, Myriam delves into Dounia's orally transmitted story in Arabic and translates it not only into writing but also into literary, poetic, and enchanting French. Myriam is the only one with a privileged access not only to Dounia's story but also to the complexity of her character contained in her speaking voice. Myriam thus enables the telling of Dounia's story, but Dounia gives Myriam the voice, the style, the sound, and the stylistic literary shape to write it with. The structure of the narrative of *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* is elliptical, non-linear, marked by a particular musicality that is not innately French.

One of the most remarkable features of the novel is the fact that it is sprinkled with Arabic proverbs that appear in the text in French, but that are carefully documented at the end of the novel in both Arabic and French. Dounia often expresses herself with Lebanese proverbs and at more than one point in the narrative, she clarifes that it is easier for her to throw a ready-made phrase in answer to Myriam's diffcult questions than trying to formulate a possibly uncomfortable truth about her own life (Farhoud 125). Feminist criticism univocally interprets this as a gendered passivity Dounia has been socialised into. However, Pruteanu accurately remarks that "this linguistic code is only the surface of another language that is the mother's inner language" (2012, 94).13 The theoretical framework used in this chapter suggests that the proverbs point to the oral tradition Dounia as a storyteller belongs to. Homer "often repeats the same formulas, recombining them," (80) the sonorous modulations of which help him remember the text determining "the very syntax of the verse" (80). In the same way, Dounia repeats the proverbs to remind herself of the story of her life. Repeating the formulaic structures of the proverbs helps her put the events into the wider narrative context of how she might have explained those events to herself at the time of their occurrence. In

13 "Ce code langagier n'est que la surface d'un autre langage intérieur de la mère qui n'a jamais su dire sa peine et ses révoltes."

terms of the textual quality of the novel, those proverbs in translation often break up the French syntax and have the effect of what Russian formalists called defamiliarisation. In the novel, Myriam is represented noting a proverb she had not heard Dounia pronounce before and writing it down in French (35). The list of proverbs at the end of the novel points to a potential real list that Farhoud herself might have kept. It has been argued that through the proverbs Farhoud inscribes her own linguistic and cultural heritage in Quebec's literary landscape (Zesseu 2015; Montandon 2006). However, the list does more than that; it symbolically bridges the gap between the oral and the written cultures which Dounia and Myriam belong to, capturing a fraction of Dounia's and Farhoud's real mother's vibrant sonorous universe and freezing it in writing for posterity.

# Conclusion

In terms of migrant mothering, Dounia claims having not been the same as a mother and as a grandmother. Her mothering is marked by emotional distress, homesickness, and what seems like a clear case of post-partum depression. When her children are young, she longs to speak to their teachers and friends, but is reduced to watching them interact as if separated by an invisible wall eloquently rendered in the novel through multiple scenes in which Dounia watches her children through the window. And yet, her lack of language in French is far from passive or destructive. Rather, it is transformed into a performative act of listening. She creates a space for her children in which they can be themselves and lead lives that they want to lead. Seen from the perspective of Cavarero's concept of the double voice in which speaking is always "a calling and a responding," Myriam's book in French is a response to Dounia's calling in Arabic. Myriam is able to become her unique writer self in French due to Dounia's speaking and listening to her in Arabic.

In short, *Happiness Has a Slippery Tail* is a story in which the mother's and the daughter's voices speak in a duet in which the unique specifcity of each voice is communicated and audible. In this way the voice of the silent mother can be heard by the Western readership, and her perspective inscribed in the Western literary tradition. The story is told in two voices: the aural voice of a marginalised mother who is voiceless in French and in writing and that of a French-educated writer daughter who understands the quality of the mother's voice in Arabic. By this narrative token, the voice of the two women becomes political since for the voices of some of the marginalised groups, including illiterate monolingual migrant mothers' voices to be heard, some women must know how to listen and how to translate them in ways that make room for the unique voices of those silent women. Furthermore, the double voice of the daughter-mother duet defes hierarchy. The daughter's perspective that unavoidably mediates the narrative to a degree and that the reader very likely identifes with serves as the sympathetic dimension of the text that withholds judgement and makes for a more nuanced representation of maternal experiences in contemporary fction.

# References

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# From Survivor to Im/migrant Motherhood and Beyond: Margit Silberstein's Postmemorial Autobiography, *Förintelsens Barn*

# *Elizabeth Kella*

Those who were in the death camps, the extermination camps, the concentration camps are becoming fewer, but we, their children still exist. I am one of them and I want to tell about my parents, what the Holocaust did to them, what it did to me, we who were not supposed to be. What it means to have taken in our parents' trauma with our mother's milk (190).1

This publication has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952366, and from the Centre for Gender Research and the Department of Literature at Uppsala University.

1 "De som befann sig i dödslägren, utrotningslägren, koncentrationslägren blir allt färre, men vi, deras barn fnns fortfarande kvar. Jag är ett av dem och jag vill berätta om mina föräldrar, vad Förintelsen gjorde med dem, vad den gjort med mig, vi som inte skulle fnnas. Vad det innebär att ha fått sina föräldrars trauma med modersmjölken" (190).

E. Kella (\*)

© The Author(s) 2023 H. Wahlström Henriksson et al. (eds.), *Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing*, Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17211-3\_6

Department of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
In Margit Silberstein's as yet untranslated work of autobiography, *Förintelsens Barn* (Children of the Holocaust) (2021a), the experience of the Holocaust strongly infuences the identities and parenting practices of her survivor parents, particularly her mother. Both Ernst Jakob Silberstein and Ili Channe Silberstein (née Grunzweig) were Hungarian-speaking Jews from Transylvania who were alone among their families to survive the Nazi genocide. Ernst survived incarceration in a Soviet labor camp, and Silberstein's mother lived through frst Auschwitz, then the death march to the camp in Bergen-Belsen, from which she was liberated in 1945. Ili was transported by the white buses—a rescue attempt organized by the Swedish Red Cross at the end of the war—to Norrköping in Sweden and her fancé Ernst was reunited with her there in 1948.2 The two lived and worked in Norrköping most of their lives, where they raised Margit (born 1950) and her younger brother, Willy (born 1954). While Ernst spoke little of his experiences in Siberia, and is represented as a quiet, introverted, and troubled man, Ili told her daughter stories about her prewar and war experiences and was a central force in the household when Silberstein was growing up. Silberstein's text foregrounds her childhood in this household, and the parental transmission of traumatic Holocaust memory, including the corporeal maternal transmission as suggested in the epigraph by the image of trauma fowing like milk from the mother's breast. The text also represents Silberstein's adult relationship with her mother, and her own maternal relation with her two sons, suggesting that she, too, inadvertently transmits a form of traumatic memory to her offspring, which affects their experience of being Jewish in Sweden.

Silberstein, a prominent journalist who has worked in print, radio, and television, wrote *Förintelsens Barn* after retiring from her work on national public television as a political news commentator and moving on to freelance journalism. The title she selected for her autobiography pays homage to Helen Epstein's groundbreaking work from 1979, *Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors*, which Silberstein explicitly cites (188). Both title and citation insert Silberstein's text into a tradition inaugurated by Epstein, herself descending from survivors, of children of survivors identifying as members of a distinct

2For a discussion of the controversy surrounding Sweden's attempt to rescue Scandinavians, cooperating in sending non-Scandinavians to other camps, and widening the rescue attempt to include other imprisoned or interned people only serendipitously, see Kvist Geverts (2020, 2021).

group, frequently referred to as the postmemory generation, with unique experiences of growing up with fathers and mothers profoundly marked by Holocaust trauma.

Silberstein's account, however, also inserts itself into another narrative tradition in which mothers fgure strongly: the discourse of im/migration and the emerging discourse of im/migrant or minority literature in Sweden. The term im/migration, incorporating the words "immigration" and "migration," is used here to attempt to retain some of the complexity and consequences of defnitions, as well as the relations between categories of refugees, migrants, and immigrants. According to Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos, refugees are frequently viewed as being subject to state violence or persecution, while migrants may be moving in order to improve their prospects for their families (2016, 1–2). While not all migrants become immigrants, most immigrants have at one time or another been migrants, in the broadest sense, even if they have not been refugees.3 The category of im/migrant literature rests problematically but inevitably on authorship, with im/migrant literature being written by im/ migrants or their descendants. Wolfgang Behschnitt uses the term "migrant literature" to discuss fction in Sweden. He also discusses problems of defnition and classifcation, but demonstrates that this category circulates in Swedish literary discourse and literary practice, and that authors themselves "take part in public debate and inscribe themselves into the discourse on literature, migration and cultural diversity" (2010, 81).

Sweden is today known for an immigration and refugee policy which has made it one of the leading European nations for immigration in twenty-frst-century Europe, and these demographic trends, as Anna Williams notes, have come to infuence contemporary literature, where im/migration and its many consequences have become a strong theme, frequently in work by children of frst-generation immigrants (2021, 122). Sweden's modern immigration history begins, however, toward the end of World War II when it began to accept refugees from the war, even if Jewish people were not considered to be political refugees at the time, but were considered by the Swedish authorities as immigrants (Kvist Geverts 2020,

3The 1951 Refugee Convention defnes refugees as being outside their country of nationality due to persecution or fear of persecution on multiple grounds, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has since expanded this defnition. See, for example, the UNHCR website.

154).4 In spite of the long-standing presence of Jews in Sweden, Scandinavian Jews feeing persecution were frst admitted in 1943 and European Jews in 1944 (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 175). Other European Jews were taken in on at least a provisional basis from 1944, as the war neared its end. About 4000 of those Jewish immigrants who came stayed in Sweden after the war, as did Silberstein's mother and, eventually, her father. This makes Silberstein one of the estimated 20,000 Jewish persons living in Sweden today, where Jews are a recognized national minority. In today's Sweden, where 20% of the population is foreign-born, she is also among the 5% of the population born in Sweden to two foreignborn parents (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 175–176).

Though it seems obvious that Holocaust survivors have been both refugees and im/migrants to new countries, im/migrant status has been somewhat submerged in accounts by children of survivors, who instead view the Holocaust as the defning experience of their parents' and not infrequently their own lives. *Förintelsens Barn*, I suggest, engages with cultural narratives of both postmemory and im/migrant identity, both of which infuence the representation of motherhood and the fgure of the mother. Silberstein's mother is represented as resilient and tenacious, but also as "broken" (134), a woman who survives the horrors of the camps but fails to rid herself of the trauma or to completely assimilate to Swedish society. In keeping with both narratives, the daughter's view of the mother and motherhood in this postmemorial account is marked by strong ambivalence.

# Postmemory as a Generational Concern

From the 1980s onward, in Sweden as well as in other countries to which survivors settled after the war, autobiographies and family memoirs written by children of survivors began to explore what it meant to grow up in families marked by a history of genocide.5 While the experiences

4 See Kvist Geverts (2020) for a discussion of discriminatory processing of Jewish immigration applications between 1938 and 1944, as well as for controversies around Swedish wartime treatment of Jews.

5English-language texts such as Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir *Maus* (1996) or Anne Karpf's *The War After* (1996), like Swedish-language texts such as Susanne Levin's *Leva Vidare* (1994), emerged in contexts of Holocaust denial and the loss of survivors, generating critical thought on issues such as the legacy of the Holocaust and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory.

themselves undoubtedly contribute to a sense of group identity, the sharing of childhood memories and narrativization of post-Holocaust family life have become fundamental to the generational distinctiveness of the generation known as the postmemory generation. Coined by another child of survivors, Marianne Hirsch (2012), "postmemory" refers not to an actual individual memory but to the forceful, affective traces of someone else's—usually a survivor parent's—memory of traumatic experiences as these traces are apprehended by their children. Hirsch's formulations have been foundational in academic discourses on the Holocaust, trauma, and memory, and thus, they, too, contribute to a sense of generational distinctiveness. Investigating survivors, rather than children of survivors, Rebecca Clifford's conclusions about generational identity are nevertheless relevant: "While formative events are important, a shared process of remembering and narrating is more so, fred into action by a historical context that can emerge decades after the fact" (2017, 23). In line with this insight, this chapter views *Förintelsens Barn* as joining an established narrative and discursive tradition which foregrounds family trauma, parental transmission, and child susceptibility. Publishing later than many of the frst children of survivors, Silberstein both assumes and explores the idea that her parents' Holocaust experiences have a bearing on her childhood, her adult relationship with her mother, and her own practice of mothering, to which her two adult sons testify in the fnal chapters of her book.

To consider Silberstein's text as part of an established narrative and discursive tradition is certainly not intended to discount the reality or validity of her account. Instead, it is meant to acknowledge the ways that such traditions may affect the formation and understanding of identity, and the way that they can contribute to other cultural narratives of, for example, post-Holocaust family and motherhood.6 While postmemorial life writing offers loving and positive portraits of survivor motherhood, many accounts by children of survivors also present complex and fraught relations. Hirsch elaborates on the consequences of postmemory for children of survivors:

To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to risk having

6 In Holocaust witness studies, considerable attention has been given to the way that interview protocols, narrative, and media use can shape testimony. See, for example, Shenker (2015).

one's own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. (2012, 5)

Together with trauma and memory studies, works of autobiography and memoir thus also contribute to a widespread assumption of problematic or pathological parenting among survivors.7 As one sociologist summarizes it, there is an "overwhelming impression that trauma is the central if not dominant dynamic in the family lives and memories of [children of survivors]" (Wolf 2019, 74). Thus, the intergenerational transmission of trauma remains key to the now classic understanding of children of survivors as the postmemory generation, arguably also affecting how these children—now parents and even grandparents themselves—understand themselves, their families, and their mothers.

This chapter argues that *Förintelsens Barn* largely conforms to the postmemory narrative in its treatment of maternal identity and transmission of Holocaust trauma. At the same time, the text overlaps with the emerging genre of im/migrant autobiography in Sweden—a genre which also has generational concerns at its heart. These two narratives affect the author's portrayal and understanding of mothering and motherhood—of both Ili and of Margit—after the Holocaust and in Sweden. In other words, while complex mother-daughter relations are important to Silberstein's interrogation of the legacy of the Holocaust and the transmission of memory, *Förintelsens Barn* moves toward an overlapping defnition of itself as immigrant or minority autobiography.

# Holocaust Mothers and Daughters

In a signifcant number of English-language postmemory narratives by children of survivors from about the 1980s onward, second-generation daughters take pains to represent their mother's voices. Hybrid texts frequently result from the inclusion of quotations or entire sections from interviews or written accounts. In this way, postmemorial writing at least

7The intergenerational transmission of trauma continues to be investigated in psychology and medicine. See Payne and Berle, 2020, for a recent overview. See also Wolf, 2019, for a discussion of recent trends toward documenting the transmission of resilience and joy among survivors.

partially offsets the literary dominance of the daughter's voice over that of the mother. Postmemory writing in Swedish also has examples of this effort to include the maternal voice. In Susanne Levin's *Leva vidare* (1994*, Live on*), Anders Ohlsson observes (2000, 31–33), the third-person narrative focalizes the mother, and Lena Einhorn's *Ninas resa* (2005) incorporates her mother's words, recorded in interviews with her daughter, in both text and flm versions. *Förintelsens Barn* both conforms to and deviates from this pattern. The work does contain sparse excerpts from letters written by Silberstein's father to her mother after the war, as he waited to immigrate to Sweden. Silberstein and her brother did not have these letters translated from the Hungarian so they could read them until after the deaths of both parents, however. Her mother's letters to her father, if any existed, were not preserved. Nor is there any indication that Silberstein used her journalistic skills to interview her mother about her Holocaust experiences. The daughter's perspective is dominant in *Förintelsens Barn*, though motherhood is central to the narrative.

Silberstein's text conceives of motherhood much as Adrienne Rich (1995, 13) would have it, as a position and an identity which is culturally, socially, and historically constructed. The very premise of the narrative, evident from the epigraph to this chapter, implicitly endorses the view that Holocaust history has had a strong effect on family life and Ili's practice of mothering. Silberstein's narrative undertaking is to explain what the Holocaust "did" to her parents and her family and to connect this to generational transmission within families, to the idea that the Holocaust also did something to her and her brother, and ultimately to Silberstein's own children. The view of historically contingent mothering also emerges explicitly in her explanations of specifc practices common to Holocaust survivors, such as her mother's choice to name Margit after her favorite sister, murdered by the Nazis (24–25), and her mother's encouragement of family solidarity (111). Additionally, Silberstein poses the related question of whether Holocaust survival affected the practice of parenthood in her family: "What parents would Mother and Father have been if there had not been an Auschwitz? This is impossible to answer. So that which was diffcult for my brother and me in our relationship to mom and dad we usually attributed to the Holocaust" (113).8 Silberstein observes a

8 "Vilka föräldrar hade mamma och pappa varit om inte Auschwitz funnits? Det går inte att svara på. Så det som var svårt för min bror och mig i vår relation till mamma och pappa tillskrev vi oftast Förintelsen" (113).

propensity to explain relational diffculties, "that which was diffcult," as an effect of Holocaust experience.

But what *was* diffcult in the mother-daughter relationship, which Silberstein attributes to Ili's Holocaust experiences? Her mother's strongest convictions about the meaning of life, according to Silberstein, grew out of her survival of the camps: "Mother's answer to the question of how a life after Auschwitz was possible is one word: the children. To have a new family" (57).9 Ili's assertion resonates with the sentiments of numerous survivors and their descendants, (including Silberstein later in life), in which the post-Holocaust creation of Jewish family successfully rebukes and defes the Nazis' genocidal ambitions (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 178). For the child Margit, however, having such importance to the lives and happiness of one's parents was a heavy burden. Silberstein writes, "My brother and I became their salvation, we gave them meaning and they loved us more than anything else on this earth. Is all-encompassing love only of good? It can instill self-esteem, but also consuming guilt" (27). She refects as well on what she felt was the disproportionate signifcance she knew she had on her parents as a child: "One wishes to be important to one's mother and father, but maybe not everything, that is unattainable" (10). Silberstein characterizes growing up as a child of survivors as being burdened by unrealistic expectations: "I wanted to be normal, not a miracle. Not the reason for Mom and Dad to fnd meaning in life" (97).10 She writes movingly, and repeatedly, of the guilt she feels in relation to her mother, both in childhood and as an adult.

Silberstein also attributes parental and maternal overprotectiveness to the profound importance placed on children in the family, who defed Hitler by their very existence, and who were also seen as symbolically replacing murdered family members, such as Silberstein's namesake, her mother's sister, or her father's little sister, Irma. As she puts it, "Holocaust survivors—they overprotect, they press their children close, they do not want to let go, they give everything and they want to get in return, unconditional love …" (113). Both parents watched over her health, for nothing

9 "Mammas svar på frågan om hur ett liv efter Auschwitz var möjligt är ett ord: barnen. Att få en ny familj" (57).

10 "Jag och min bror blev deras räddning, vi gav dem mening och de älskade oss över allt annat på denna jord. Är allomfattande kärlek enbart av godo? Den kan ge självkänsla, men också förtärande skuld" (27); "Man vill såklart vara betydelsefull för sin mor och far, men kanske inte allt, det är ouppnåeligt" (10); "Jag ville vara vanlig, inte något underverk. Inte anledningen till att mamma och pappa kunde fnna mening i livet" (97).

was to happen to their little family (42). She tells of a playmate who was also a child of survivors who thought her name was "Barbro-be-careful," because that was what her mother called to her as she supervised her play from the window of their home. Silberstein claims that she became a "Margit-be-careful" because "Nothing was to happen to me. I was to always be strong and healthy, happy and good" (43). Being overprotected, moreover, is connected in the text to unreasonable expectations, such as always being good and nice: "If you are a child of Holocaust survivors you must always be nice—that's how it felt. I could have a guilty conscience if I went home with my best friend after school … instead of asking Mother if she needed help with anything. All my pores were wide open for selfrecriminations" (98).11 Silberstein's adult understanding of maternal (over)protectiveness conforms to that expressed in numerous other postmemory narratives, and examples abound in *Förintelsens Barn.*

Silberstein writes about both of her parents and describes her father in loving terms, but her mother is clearly central to the household and to Silberstein as a child. Numerous interviews with the author confrm her mother's importance: "Mother was central in our family" (Cederskog 2021); " there was a lot of Mamma"; "Mamma was a strong person in our lives" (Silberstein 2021b). 12 As a child, Silberstein is very close to her mother, whom she resembles (23). A skilled seamstress and embroiderer whose talents were sought after in their small town, Ili hated being alone (47) and liked to talk with her daughter as she sewed (44). Unlike Silberstein's father, who never spoke about what happened in the Soviet labor camp, Ili spoke of her life before and during the war, communicating her experiences to her young daughter, both through storytelling and through less verbal means, in line with Federica K. Clementi's suggestion, in *Holocaust Mothers and Daughters* (2013), that mothers seem to share their memories with their children, more than fathers do (218). In one interview, Silberstein claims that "What I know I know through Mother,"

11 "Om man är barn till överlevande från Förintelsen måste man alltid vara snäll—så kändes det. Jag kunde få dåligt samvete om jag följde med min bästis hem efter skolan en stund … istället för att fråga mamma om hon behövde hjälp med något. Alla mina porer var vidöppna för självförebråelser" (98).

12 "Mamma var central i vår familj" (Cederskog 2021); "… det har varit väldigt mycket mamma" och "Mamma var en stark person i våran liv" (Silberstein 2021b). In this interview Silberstein says that her mother spoke from endless grief, but she did not give any details. "The camp" functioned as a code word in the family.

even though she says that her mother did not give any details about her Holocaust experiences (Silberstein 2021b).13

In *Förintelsens Barn* Silberstein observes:

I was born fve years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and when Mother talked to me when I was a child her entire consciousness was flled with the horrors and the bottomless loss of those who died. Somehow, I became a confdante. I know, psychologists would be horrifed. She absolutely did not tell me everything, but a lot. My imagination flled the gaps with grotesque, dark imaginings, thoughts that a child should not need to be caught up in. (44–45)14

Registering her adult awareness of the negative view psychology would take of her mother making her child a confdante, Silberstein subtly criticizes her mother. She also refects on the reasons for her mother's confdences: Ili may have sought to replicate the intimacy she once had with her sister Margit. Silberstein, the postmemoirist, understands the impossibility of her child-self answering her mother's need, as well as the guilty conscience resulting from that inescapable failure (46–47).

Postmemory, as Hirsch develops the concept, involves not actual recall but is mediated by embodied affect and imagination (5). As a child, Silberstein's imagination is captured by the Holocaust, particularly camp experiences such as her mother must have undergone. For example, she writes about having "daily imaginings about selection to the gas chambers, about roll call in Auschwitz, how it was to stand completely still hour after hour in summer as well as winter, no matter the weather, before and after laboring, so that the guards could count in peace … " (95).15 She also fantasized about accompanying her mother on the death march from

13 In the television interview Silberstein (2021b) says, "Vad jag vet vet jag genom mamman." Moreover, Silberstein told her interviewer that she also absorbed that which was "unspoken" ("outtalat").

14 "Jag föddes fem år efter befrielsen av Auschwitz och Bergen-Belsen och när mamma pratade med mig som liten var hela hennes medvetande fyllt av fasorna och den bottenlösa saknaden efter de döda. På något sätt blev jag en förtrogen. Jag vet, psykologer skulle förfäras. Hon berättade absolut inte allt, men åtskilligt. Luckorna fyllde fantasin i med groteska, mörka föreställningar, tankar som ett barn inte ska behöva svepas in i" (44–45).

15 "Jag kunde ha dagliga föreställningar om selekteringen till gaskamrarna, om appellerna i Auschwitz, hur det var att stå helt stilla timme efter timme sommar som vinter, oavsett vädret, före och efter arbetet, för att vakterna i lugn och ro skulle kunna räkna så att antalet fångar stämde" (95).

Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, and reading books such as *Barnen från Frostmofjället* about orphaned brothers and sisters setting out on a long trek to avoid being put into a poorhouse (85) fed this imaginative connection to her mother. As Hirsch notes, even intimate transmission of memories in the domestic or familial context are mediated by public narratives (35). Claiming that she cannot remember a time when she did not know what Auschwitz was (43), Silberstein also describes being strongly drawn to pain: "I wanted to go into it, feel it, let the intolerable, the incomprehensible, burn in me as well. As if my mother's torture could be lessened if I shared it with her" (83).16 This form of imaginative identifcation, strong in a child who idolizes her mother (100), leads the young Silberstein to reproduce her mother's physical suffering in a vain attempt to alleviate it. She stops eating: "I starved myself so that only a thin skin covered my skeleton. Did I want to be as thin as mother in Auschwitz?" (83).

In her study of Holocaust mothers and daughters, Clementi analyzes another postmemoir which, like *Förintelsens Barn*, suggests that "eating disorders [are] displaced symptoms of traumatic Shoah memory or postmemory" (2013, 206).17 In Silberstein's case, her anorexia does indeed suggest a "dislocation" of daughterly identity (Clementi 2013, 206), a misplaced identifcation with her mother through self-harm. Far from alleviating her mother's burden, Silberstein only exacerbates Ili's pain at seeing her daughter starve as she, her sisters, and others in the camps once did. At one point, Ili tells her daughter that her emaciated body is a reminder to her, and others, of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen (85).

Silberstein appears to have viewed her parents as vulnerable and fragile, because of the suffering, starvation, and illnesses they had been through, only some of which she knew about. She writes that she later understood that many survivors "suffered from the same syndrome as my mother.

16 "När jag var barn hade smärtan en nästan befängd dragningskraft på mig. Jag ville gå in i den, känna den, låta det outhärdliga, det ofattbara, brinna också i mig. Som om mon mors plågor skulle mildras om jag delade dem med henne."

17Clementi writes about Helena Janeczek's *Lezioni di tenebra* (1997). Irene Oore's *The Listener* (2019) recounts Holocaust episodes of extreme hunger as well as the daughter Oore's remarkable suggestion to her survivor mother, late in life, that she stops eating in order to avoid choking. Anca Vlasopolos's *No Return Address* (2000) also concerns questions of food.

Depression, nightmares, nervosity, sleep disturbances" (99).18 Her reference to a "syndrome" confrms her familiarity with works of memoir and postmemoir, and this is underscored by the text's many references to Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, and Anne Frank: Frank's diary was particularly important to the young Silberstein, who thought that if Frank had lived they would have been "twin souls" (88). Frank's writing may even have inspired Silberstein to keep the diary from which she quotes in her autobiography.

As in other works of postmemory, *Förintelsens Barn* represents the daughter's attempt to imitate or emulate her mother as futile:

But my torture could never measure up to hers. I did not have much of a claim, it was always worse for mother. How sad could I permit myself to be? My troubles were small and not very signifcant, silly, compared with that which mother bore, what did I have to complain about? Mother of course did not want me to feel that way, I am not even sure if she understood how her daughter was infuenced by what she herself went through. (83–84).19

Silberstein repeatedly confrms the fraught sentiments of postmemory—a sense of being dominated by other's narratives, of having one's own story displaced by another's traumatic history. In Silberstein's text, this appears to be particularly strong between her and her survivor mother.

# Im/migrant Mothers and Minority Daughters

This chapter has thus far focused on Silberstein's representation of the effect of Holocaust survival on her mother, the mother-daughter bond, and her mother's mothering practices. This representation is for the most part in line with other postmemorial accounts by children of survivors. But postmemory writing itself also encompasses, to varying degrees, representations of survivor parents and their families as im/migrants to new

18 "Jag förstod senare att många, antagligen de festa, som kommit levande ut från fasor som inte går att sätta ord på, led av samma syndrom som min mamma. Nedstämdhet, mardrömmar, nervositet, sömnproblem" (99).

19 "Jag svalt mig själv så att bara tunt skinn skylde skelettet. Ville jag bli lika mager som mamma i Auschwitz? Men mina plågor kunde aldrig mäta sig med hennes. Jag hade inte mycket att komma med, det var alltid värst för mamma. Hur ledsen kunde jag tillåta mig att vara? Mina bekymmer var små och inte så betydelsefulla, futtiga, jämfört med det mamma bar på, vad hade jag att klaga över? Mamma ville förstås inte att jag skulle känna så, jag vet inte ens om hon förstod hur hennes dotter påverkades av det hon själv gått igenom" (83–84).

countries. Hirsch emphasizes that the postmemory generation is always in some respect diasporic, marginal, or exiled (qtd in Clementi 2013, 221), and Clementi concurs. She writes:

On the one hand, all survivors want is for their children to be happy, safe, and prosperous in the free society where they have rebuilt their lives; on the other, because the parents themselves strain to fully belong to these new nations—where they arrived as adults with a heavy burden of pain and with accents, traditions, and social behaviors they retain—their children like them may end up feeling split between fully belonging … and being foreigners in their country of birth (Clementi 2013, 219).

In *Förintelsens Barn*, im/migration exists as an alternative explanation for Ili's mothering practices, affecting her relationship with her daughter and her daughter's understanding of her own and her mother's identity. Silberstein quite explicitly inserts her writing into a discourse of im/migration and minority identity in contemporary Sweden.

Silberstein relates her mother's story of post-war im/migration with pride. Her mother arrived from Bergen-Belsen to Norrköping on July 8, 1945. Twenty-eight years old, weighing just thirty-four kilos, Ili was transported on a stretcher (51). She lived at frst with other im/migrants in a repurposed school, where she was nursed back to health (58), and later she rented a room, made friends, and began working at the public bathhouse (59). Among the letters from Silberstein's father is one deploring the fact that Ili must work for a living. Yet, Silberstein appears proud of her mother when she writes, "My mother was not lazy. She was clever and industrious. She personifed the expression, 'someone who earns her keep'" (59).20 In Transylvania, she had had to give up her dream of becoming a teacher for fnancial reasons, and she had instead learned to machine embroider, like other Romanian girls. In Norrköping, Ili starts up a cottage industry in their small apartment, embroidering sheets and towels and other dowry items. Silberstein proudly quotes from the royal permit allowing Ili to run her embroidery business as long as she remained in Norrköping, even though she was not a Swedish citizen (60). After Silberstein's father arrived, the two of them cooperated in the business which, in the 1950s, ft nicely into the town's burgeoning textile industry.

20 "Min mamma latade sig inte. Hon var duktig och arbetsam. Hon personiferar uttrycket, 'en som gör rätt för sig'" (59). The expression has additional connotations, including doing one's part and doing right by others.

Her parents learned Swedish, her mother better than her father (71), but they often spoke Hungarian to one another, sometimes, to their daughter's embarrassment, in public (31). Her father worked at the wool textile factory and later at another factory for electronics, but in the 1960s he and Ili opened a shoe store together. Both parents are represented as working hard, for long hours, to support themselves and their two children, building a new life in a new country which had taken them in after the war (31).

Silberstein's childhood memories offer a view of the economic hardships common to refugees or im/migrants who have had to start their lives over from scratch, but who are successful in supporting themselves and their children, even buying luxury items such as a piano for their child. Her memories, frequently nostalgic, recount both what they could afford and what they could not (110). Highly attuned to the nuances of class society in the 1950s, Silberstein describes her family's small apartment with cold water and a shared bathroom in the courtyard, contrasting it with that of her friend, who shared an indoor bathroom, and with the street where some of her classmates lived, in apartments large enough that children could have their own rooms. On this street, the children addressed their parents with formality (28). Silberstein recounts an incident from her childhood, when her family's economic status made itself felt. She enjoyed talking to the women who contracted sewing from her mother so much that when they came round to leave or pick up work from Ili, the young Silberstein routinely offered them coffee so they would stay. Her tired mother fnally had to ask her not to prolong these visits, which kept her from her work. Silberstein's awareness of economic status is something she seemed to process by playing what she called "The Poverty Game" (86) as a child—a game of endless wandering inspired by her mother's camp experiences and by a classic of Swedish children's literature involving orphaned children, *Barnen från Frostmofjället*. But in other ways she appears to be unaware of economic diffculties; only in hindsight does she register the sacrifces her parents must have made to give their daughter a piano, and she does not take in the fnancial side of her and her brother being sent to camp in the US. Silberstein's postmemoir contains traces of what must have been diffcult parental decisions.

As Schultes and Vallianatos observe, im/migrants are frequently confronted with a choice between enacting mothering practices based on their own experiences in the culture of their birth and their sometimes incomplete understanding of practices common to their new country (3). By extension, parenting practices thus become an index of the degree of social integration and/or im/migrant difference. These different orientations in the performance of parenthood are made visible in Silberstein's text. Her father grew up in rural Romania where, before the war, a strict morality governed relations between boys and girls (72).21 Her mother came from Satu Mare, a county seat in Transylvania with a thriving Jewish community. Silberstein's parents wanted to parent in ways they knew from before the war. Their rules were strict, and Margit was not allowed to be out late or to do everything that her friends were allowed to do. Both parents, she writes, feared an all-too liberal Swedish behavior (71). Neither parent could accept "that their daughter was stamped by Swedish society, entirely different from the society they had been forced to leave, a world which in their memory had come to a standstill, like a snapshot in a photo album" (133).22 In other words, according to Silberstein, both parents performed at least some aspects of parenthood in opposition to what they understood about Swedish practices.

Generational conficts between parents and daughter were exacerbated by cultural differences around issues of parental supervision and the independence of young people. Silberstein describes her teenage years as a time of growing estrangement from her mother in particular, whose "children lived in a world which she could not enter, which she did not want to enter" (136).23 Silberstein's anorexia, as mentioned, indicates the intensity with which she identifes with her mother at this time, but her retrospective account also emphasizes her growing need for personal integrity. As she puts it, "It was not even that Mother and Father wanted to cross boundaries, my boundaries, they saw none. We were family, a constellation without barriers …" (134).24 Silberstein describes trying to explain to her mother that "children must cut the umbilical cord, free themselves, learn to fy. No one owns another person, not even parents in relation to their offspring. She really did not understand, she became sad, she thought this

21Much of Transylvania changed hands between Hungary and Romania in 1920 and then before and after the World War II.

22 "Mamma och pappa förmådde inte acceptera att deras dotter präglats av den svenska samhället, helt annorlunda än det de tvingats lämna, en värld som i deras minne stannat upp, som en ögonblicksbild i ett fotoalbum" (133).

23 "Hennes barn levde i en värld dit hon inte hade tillträde, hon ville inte komma in" (136).

24 "Det var inte ens så att mamma och pappa ville överträda gränser, mina gränser, de såg inga. Vi var familj, en konstellation utan barriärer …" (134).

meant that I would disappear from her, leave her" (130–31).25 When Silberstein does in fact leave home, she experiences a crisis of identity, not understanding her own boundaries in relation to her parents (133). While Silberstein clearly attributes the importance of family to her mother's Holocaust experience, as discussed, there remain elements which can be linked to the experience of im/migrant motherhood, with Ili drawing from her experiences of Jewish family life in pre-war Romania, and her daughter rooted frmly in the modern social welfare state of Sweden. Silberstein describes clashes with her parents over issues such as privacy and openness, independence and mutuality, and not least, sexuality.

While mothers have been found to have a strong infuence on their daughters' identity formation and sexuality (Giorgio 2002, 7), such a relation—anticipated by Ili, we can surmise—appears to be disrupted by the different orientations of mother and daughter, one more affected by her im/migrant status, the other by her "native" status. The estrangement between mother and daughter worsens as Silberstein's sexuality awakens, and mild conficts escalate when Silberstein becomes sexually active: "When Mother understood that her adult daughter had adult relations she lost her grip. I felt like all hell broke loose, she plagued me, she said things that a mother should never say to her little girl" (135).26 The text remains reticent about what harsh words were spoken, and the timeline of sections dealing with these issues is fuzzy, but there appears to be a breach in the mother-daughter relationship which is never to be completely overcome.

Silberstein's survivor parents were not just invested in their family but were also strongly invested in the reproduction and continuity of family. In part because of matrilineal descent in Judaism, their daughter is important. Silberstein recalls the period after she moved away from home, when her non-Jewish boyfriend lived with her on weekends. Silberstein feels responsible for her mother having a heart attack during this time: "I was not like they wanted me to be, I lived like 'the Swedes.' I had the key to their happiness, but I threw it away. If I only would marry and let them experience the joy of grandchildren their lives would change, they would

25 "En gång försökte jag förklara för mamma att barn måste klippa navelsträngen, lösgöra sig, fyga själva. Ingen äger en annan människa, inte ens föräldrar i förhållande till avkomman. Hon förstod verkligen//inte, hon blev ledsen, hon uppfattade det som att jag skulle försvinna från henne, lämna henne" (130–31).

26 "När mamma förstod att hennes vuxna dotter hade vuxna relationer förlorade hon fotfästet. Jag kände det som att helvetet bröt lös, hon plågade mig, hon sa saker som en mamma inte ska säga till sin ficka" (135).

become happy" (135).27 While the desire for descendants can certainly be understood as springing from a history of survival in the face of ethnic persecution, the anticipated parental supervision of reproduction within the family is represented as also grounded in pre-war Jewish life in Romania.

As a child of im/migrant survivor parents, Silberstein struggles with conficting understandings of herself as the child of survivors, as a member of the Jewish minority, and as a Swede. There is considerable overlap between these categories and the frst two, if not identical, are strongly related in Silberstein's mind. During a trip to Romania after her mother's death, she realizes, to her distress, that she feels her mother most strongly in Auschwitz, suggesting the strength of the association between her mother and the Holocaust as well as the weight of the Holocaust on her own sense of Jewishness. In conversation with her adult sons, she sees that the Holocaust is intrinsic to her Jewish identity (181). Silberstein also conceptualizes her bi-cultural or dual identity with the help of her "Jewish" name and her "Swedish" name, a Jewish identity strongly connected to the Holocaust through her mother's murdered sister, Margit, and a Swedish identity forged from her parents' mistaken belief that Asta was a typically Swedish name (24). Her parents' choice of names clearly speaks of their early recognition that their daughter will need to negotiate the demands of being both Swedish and Jewish.

Silberstein's narrative inscribes a struggle to harmonize dual identities, both as a young person and as a mother herself. Indeed, she expresses the desire that her twin sons will also have a dual identity, as Swedes and Jews (174). While, as noted, there is no trace of interviews or other records of Ili's voice in *Förintelsens Barn*, Silberstein does interview her twin sons, Markus and Joel, reporting their thoughts using indirect discourse in the penultimate chapter of her book. Her interest is in understanding what their Jewish background means to them, but also in determining if she, through her mothering, has unwillingly transmitted to them the trauma of the Holocaust. Silberstein reviews her maternal ambitions, frequently in relation to her own mother's practices. Since she grew up feeling diffuse but debilitating guilt in relation to her mother and the Holocaust, she tried hard to avoid giving her children any feelings of guilt (174). Because

27 "Jag var inte som de ville, jag levde som 'svenskarna'. Jag hade nyckeln till deras lycka, men jag slängde den i sjön. Om jag bara gifte mig och lät dem uppleva lyckan i att få barnbarn skulle deras liv förändras, de skulle bli lyckliga" (135).

she listened to the warning of the little girl "who sat at a small red table next to her machine-embroidering mother and listened to stories about Auschwitz" (175), she tried not to talk too much about the Holocaust when her boys were small. She sought to encourage and protect their integrity. The responses of her children suggest that, in spite of her strenuous efforts, she did transmit strong emotions about the Holocaust. One son felt the weight of her unspoken sorrow and instinctively encouraged her to express her grief. Her other son expresses the same feeling she had as a child, that he seemed always to have known about the Holocaust, and he remembers her as talking about it even before he began to wonder about it, though she chose her words carefully (176). Both sons see her as an overprotective mother, and one refects on the psychological and emotional burden her strong concern for them generates. Silberstein explains: "That I am so caring about him and his brother, so afraid of instilling a guilty conscience because I have lived with one myself, also creates some type of guilt feeling in him" (184). Yet, her sons also affrm, in different ways, a commitment to Jewish identity and the remembrance of Holocaust history. Silberstein's interviews with her adult sons return her readers to the narrative of postmemory, exploring the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory to the third generation and confrming the continued relevance of Jewish identity in a Swedish context.

*Förintelsens Barn* writes itself into discourses of both postmemory and im/migration. Im/migration concerns not only Silberstein's survivor parents, their Romanian Jewish roots, and their im/migration to Sweden, but Silberstein herself as a Swedish Jew conceived explicitly and increasingly as the text progresses as a minority: "I am Swedish. A Swedish Jew. A Jew in Sweden. A person who belongs to another religion than the majority and to a partly different culture" (161).28 She writes to provide insights into what it means to belong to a minority in Sweden (188) and sees the struggle to maintain two identities as common among young people "who are tossed around in a centrifuge between two worlds and don't know where or how to land" (136).29 She suggests that "Maybe young people with roots in other countries can recognize my experiences. To belong, but also

28 "Jag är svensk. Svensk judinna. En judinna i Sverige. En människa som tillhör en annan religion än majoriteten och delvis en annan kultur" (161).

29 "som slungas runt i en centrifug mellan två världar och inte vet var och hur de ska landa" (136).

to have another belonging" (189).30 With her explicit focus on young people, reinforced by the dedication of her book to her sons Markus and Joel, Silberstein positions herself as a maternal, minority fgure, who was once a daughter to im/migrant parents. She concludes with the hope that her story might help young immigrants know that they are not alone (189).

# Conclusion

The notion of intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory through mother-child interaction—both backward and forward in time is integral to Silberstein's work. *Förintelsens Barn* captures the importance of the survivor mother to the daughter's sense of self, and it examines the effects of the Holocaust on the performance of motherhood, as seen in the maternal practices of her mother and later of herself, to which her sons testify in the fnal chapters of the book. Silberstein displays a keen awareness of the narrative parameters of postmemory writing, and she clearly inserts her text into this tradition, to which parent-child relations are central.