See Under: Memory; Reflections on When Memory Comes

By admitting, in the very first sentence, that he was born in Prague "at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power," Friedländer acknowledges the force of historical knowledge or what Michael André Bernstein calls backshadowing in the narration of personal experience.(6) But that sentence is followed by a lapse into the conventional discourse of the memoir: "My father was also born in Prague, while my mother came from the Sudetenland, from Rochlitz, a little textile town near Gablonz celebrated for its glassware," and several pages of genealogical detail. At the end of this excursus he implicitly acknowledges not only the privilege of prewar innocence in the recounting of prewar events, and open-endedness as its structural correlative, but their proprietary value for lives that were about to be incorporated into the apocalyptic precincts of the "historical viewpoint": "the way of life of the Jews in the Prague of my childhood was...futile and `rootless,' seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured."(7) Even as he claims his own vocation as historian, guardian of what he will call the historian's "gaze," he allows the still, small voice of the child to speak as representative of history's ever-inassimilable, intractable, raw material.
This child, as adult, admits to having no language of his own, no private territory of the self, and no narrative that is not invaded and fragmented by the war because of the tender, pre-articulate, age at which he was thrust into it. He has, that is, only the distance of the historical "gaze," of apocalyptic knowledge, to make sense of the fragments of a childhood story that cannot be lost because it was never composed. The "isolated images and events," the "shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges" form a "rubble field" or "chaotic jumble" that precedes and in a way precludes all creation, all order, all law -- and all biography.
"Paul Friedländer had disappeared; [Paul-Henri Ferland] was someone else," writes the memoirist, recording the enthusiasm and comfort with which he had embraced the worship of the Virgin at the age of ten. But the very next entry in this bifurcated narrative, dated 22 September 1977, begins: "Yom Kippur. An extraordinary silence. May I be pardoned, miscreant that I am, for continuing to write, but I must capture this silence...."(20) Reconnecting with Judaism as his "central axis"(21) at the very brink of taking priestly vows, yet unable to eat meat at the Seder table after the war because it was Good Friday, he remains a "miscreant" in every system, neither Paul nor Saul, neither [Pavel Friedl] nor Paul-Henri, but all of them. As a "person divided," he is the most inclusive persona of all. In a very sensitive analysis of the excavation of the repressed self that culminated in the writing of this memoir, Paul John Eakin cites the enigmatic passage in which Friedländer writes: