Resumen

HECKE, An Van. Memory, fiction and multilingualism in “El boxeador polaco”, a short story by Eduardo Halfon. Connotas. Rev. crit. teór. lit. [online]. 2020, n.21, pp.9-31.  Epub 15-Feb-2021. ISSN 2448-6019.  https://doi.org/10.36798/critlit.vi21.335.

This article proposes an analysis of the story “El boxeador polaco”, which forms part of the short story collection with the same title (2008) by Eduardo Halfon. In several of his books, which are usually a mixture of fiction and autobiography, Halfon deals with the question of Jewish identity. Sometimes the narrator does not recognize himself in certain Jewish traditions, but at the same time, perceives Jewish identity as something that he carries inside, which can be inferred from the respect and admiration shown for his grandfather. This grandfather is one of the two protagonists of the story “El boxeador polaco”. The subtle interplay between the two narrative voices -the grandfather’s and the grandson’s-and between the three periods -the distant past in Auschwitz, the narrator’s childhood in Guatemala and the present of the adult narrator-, seems to be a literary strategy to confront the well-known paradox of trauma: the impossibility of speaking about a trauma, on the one hand, and the strength of language as a tool to heal the traumatized on the other (Gilmore). The grandfather breaks the silence of sixty years in which he could not talk about that painful past. In this context the multilingual nature of the story, with references to Yiddish, German and Polish, will be examined. We will try to understand how Halfon handles the difficult relationship, not only between memory and fiction, but also between language and identity.

Palabras llave : Guatemala; Holocaust literature; auto fiction; trauma; multilinguism.

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