Anne Frank and Michel Laub: The Daily and Daily Violence

Abstract

The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is one of the most interesting reports of the Shoah. Elaborated from the manuscripts of a German Jewish adolescent refugee in Holland, during a Nazi persecution, the book is a great reference for world literature, especially for the Literature of Testimony. Diário da queda (2011), the autobiographical novel by the Brazilian writer Michel Laub, revolves around three generations of a Jewish family: the narrator's grandfather, driven by the experience of having been arrested in Auschwitz; the narrator's father, who carries the bitter memories of his father's suicide when he was only fourteen years old; and the son, the narrator, who carries with him the guilt of having purposely caused an accident that injured a classmate and its consequences, when he was a teenager. The Literary Diary as a genre, here in debate, emerged from a monologue text whose creation was the only reader, and it has a bit of communicative and literary characters, elements that are not anymore considered. From this genre emerges the notion of Autofiction, or even self-writing (fictions about the self), such as memories, diaries, reports, autobiographies, fictions about the self, a true autobiographical constellation, a bivalent, ambiguous, androgynous genre in which the author questions reality and himself, that it is the full in its essence, but a construction that operates within and out of the fictional text in the same life. Two Diaries, Two Children, fictions about the Holocaust: from the comparison of the these two works in diary format and their positioning of their approaches and distances, we intend to observe the change of texts, the observation of the Shoah by the child: one who lived the persecutions and related hers daily events, and the one who receive the inheritance of destroy, of the shattered family.