Language and Music in Rena's Life and Work

Rena Moses-Hrushowski died on the first of March 2007. A great deal of what she says in her article, and in particular in its final paragraphs, gains further meaning when understood in the context of her full awareness, while writing her article, of her illness and approaching death.

As one of her close friends, I was asked to add a piece on Rena to be attached to her article. Although I agreed, I encountered great difficulties in carrying out the task, not only because Rena writes about her hesitations in exposing her private life publicly, but because, like her, I have found “the fine distinction between the intimate and the personal” hard to maintain in writing about her. I finally chose to write from a stance in which I feel most at home. This piece is an attempt to listen to and comment on the music, language, and choice of words in Rena's article. As I deeply believe and attempt to show, this was a major theme in Rena's life and work.

In her opening statement, Rena tells us that when writing in English she faces an obstacle related to her difficulties with languages in general. She traces the roots of these difficulties to her experiences of the Kristallnacht, which put an abrupt end to her life in Germany and led to her emigration with her immediate family to Israel, when she was eight years old. Rena points out that a lifelong outcome of this move was “the loss of my mother tongue”; moreover, she has never since felt at home in any language, feeling as though she were always “living in a hotel.” Notwithstanding this ever-present difficulty, when invited to write for this issue of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry, she welcomed the opportunity since, as she put it, “it is often through writing that I come closest to myself, becoming crystallized in my thinking and being.” It is as if she wished to grasp, through “com[ing] closest” to herself, the unfathomable “nightmarish horror,” of the Kristallnacht—a continual presence in her inner world—while, at the same time, al