Traumatic Miss and the Work of Mourning

My grandmother was the youngest of three children in a family from Lvov, Poland, all of whom, except her, were killed during the Holocaust. The younger of her two older brothers was called Shammai (Shemeck). He was her favorite brother. For many of the years of long life after the Holocaust, she would have the same dream about him: Together, they board the train headed most likely for Auschwitz. The train suddenly stops, and she jumps off, thinking he is behind her, only to realize a moment later that he has remained on board. Then she wakes up.

In actuality, she came to Palestine shortly before the Second World War, and the scene in the dream never occurred. A German soldier shot dead her brother one evening in the street near his house, a few weeks before the entire family was sent to the concentration camps. Yet the dream repeated itself over and over again throughout the years. A few months before her death, she told me she had had the same dream again, but this time it was slightly different: She boards the train with Shemeck, the train arrives at the place where in her usual dream she jumps off, but this time she stays on board with him.

When she told me this dream, I thought it portended her approaching death and, therefore, understood the change in the dream plot as a replacement of the wish to unite her life with his life — with the wish that her death would be united with his death. During the writing of the book this paper is based on, however, something else occurred to me: staying on the train represented not only the wish to reunite with him. It was, in Cathy Caruth's (1996) terminology, an attempt to undo the awakening from the dream, which is, in effect, waking up to the missing of the traumatic event of separation. It was not the wish to take him off the train along with her that motivated the recurrent dream, but rather the wish to get back on the train to catch up with the moment when she failed to notice that he had remained on board.

In this sense,