Mosaic of History and Memory in Alexander Motyl’s Novel Fall River
The paper discusses Fall River by Alexander Motyl as a novel about history and family saga. The novel entwines the past of 20th-century East-Central Europe with the individual experiences of its protagonists—Mike/Mychasko, Manya, and Stefa. They continue the American history of the family, which sta...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2023-11-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/21031 |
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| Summary: | The paper discusses Fall River by Alexander Motyl as a novel about history and family saga. The novel entwines the past of 20th-century East-Central Europe with the individual experiences of its protagonists—Mike/Mychasko, Manya, and Stefa. They continue the American history of the family, which started in 1913 when their parents-to-be arrived from Galicia to Fall River, Mass., to leave it for Europe ten years later. The life of the three siblings epitomizes the dramatic history of Eastern Galicia and the pre-and post-WWII Ukrainian immigration to the United States. A small Ukrainian-Polish-Jewish community in the provincial Galician town of Przemyślany, where most of the action takes place, becomes a small-scale version of historical and political conflicts of the 1920s-1940s. The paper draws on Astrid Erll’s theory of cultural memory and Paul Connerton’s concept of forgetfulness to analyze Fall River as part of the Ukrainian cultural memory and explore the role of forgetting in the characters’ identity construction, particularly their new American selves. The historical background that shapes Mike’s, Manya’s, and Stefa’s lives reveals the entanglements of East-Central European history of the first half of the 20th century, of which the American reader knows little if anything, and addresses complex ethnic relations and political dilemmas that were part of the characters’ everyday life. While history is the normative frame of reference in the novel, a sense of home and the awareness of its traumatic loss are some of the centrifugal forces of the story, which determine the characters’ attitudes. They evoke the idea of uprootedness (Weil) and nostalgic memory (Boym), which will be analyzed as an essential part of immigrant narratives. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |