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Leora Auslander
French philosopher, Sarah Kofman, opened the memoir she wrote shortly before
she committed suicide in 1994, with the following:
Of him all I have left is the fountain pen. I took it one day from my mother’s purse, where
she kept it along with some other souvenirs of my father. It is a kind of pen no longer
made, the kind you have to fill with ink. I used it all through school. It “failed” me before
I could bring myself to give it up. I still have it, patched up with Scotch tape; it is right
in front of me on my desk and makes me write, write.
Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about “that.” 8
This is the entirety of the first chapter. We enter the story of “that,” of her father’s
deportation and death in 1942 and her life under the Occupation, and of her
difficulty in coming to terms with it, through a banal object, a pen. Of the objects
in her mother’s purse, it is the pen, her father’s instrument of communication, a
tool he used daily, a tool in constant contact with his skin, that Kofman, the child
who would become a philosopher, chose to take. The pen with which her rabbi father
wrote his sermons became the pen with which his daughter wrote philosophy. Even
when it, too, has submitted to time, it sits there, compelling her to write, exhorting
her to face a past she seeks to avoid.
The capacity of goods to materialize human relations, including betrayal, is also
vividly rendered in Lotte Strauss’s memoir, as she recounts her return to her
childhood home in Wolfenbüttel in 1958:
Entering the caretaker’s apartment, I realized immediately that some of our furniture
stood in their entranceway. When we were asked into the living room, I became aware
in a flash that most of their furniture had been ours: there was the couch with unmistakable
pattern (I could still describe it), the table on which I had done my homework,
my father’s leather chair, even the little print of Rubens’s baby son. I could not walk one
step further into that apartment: I felt nauseated, my stomach turned, words failed me: I
had to leave, no matter what the others thought. 9
Those few sentences economically convey the impossibility of a return “home”
and reunion with those entrusted with the family’s future. The tragedy is all the
greater because she had brought her husband and adolescent daughter, hoping to
show both of them the scene of her own childhood. In this case, it would have
been better had the things been destroyed along with her parents, rather than
faithlessly going on, serving other masters, participating in their betrayal.
In both Kofman’s and Strauss’s usages, the goods themselves carried memories
and meanings, and in both cases the authors are very conscious that those
memories and meanings will be fully apparent to their audience. 10 They write
knowing that their readers, who may be incapable of identifying with much else
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