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“I have no mother tongue, nor a father tongue either.”
Imagine such a state — tumultuous inner experience with no language that holds a containing familiarity, a chaotic state constantly fragmented by having to piece together random sounds. The empty nature of words is obvious in a way that threatens to empty all experience of meaning. What is lacking is not just native language, but mother and father tongue, a fleshy, intimate communication of self-experience and meaning to another. The state is a decentering so radical that it threatens continuous shattering and mute isolation.
This scenario is the evocative opening of Fragments, published as a memoir by a man who names himself Binjamin Wilkomirski. Critically acclaimed for both the quality of the writing and the person of the author, the book won numerous awards from groups throughout the world, including the National Holocaust Museum. It is the enormously moving story of a very young boy that begins with his family's attempts to hide from the Nazis, and ends with his adoption and adjustment to postwar years in Switzerland. The book graphically depicts his experiences from about the age of three, as he literally loses his parents and, subsequently, his brothers, and finds himself alone in the horrors of the concentration camps. At the war's end, which is never announced to him, he is taken to Polish and Swiss orphanages and is adopted finally by a Swiss couple. All the while he tries to make sense of both the war and a peace that he thinks is a cruel subterfuge. Throughout the telling, the book presents the author's attempt to find and make a self from the “shards of memory” available to him after repeated, violent shatterings of any self-coherence.
The book's fervent reception owes a great deal to its intensely vivid depiction of a child's raw internal experience, and the fact that its very writing seemed to represent the triumph of the utmost innocence and vulnerability over the utmost malevolence and horror. We a