Zombie History Stalks Ukraine

In a haunted novel, memories of a brutal past transform bodies as well as psyches.

- Judith Shulevitz

The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk's novel Forgottenness broods upon what I'd call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one's forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms.

Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much of the literature about intergenerational trauma focuses on the reappearance of symptoms in the next generation, though they may, indeed commonly do, persist into the third and beyond. Here they seem dormant in the children and resurface in a grandchild.

In Forgottenness (the first novel originally written in Ukrainian to be published by a major U.S. trade house), a young woman mops compulsively, finally driving away her fiancé. She is the narrator, a writer who is never named. The time is the present, which seems to mean about a decade ago; the novel came out in Ukraine in 2016. As a child, she learned how to wash a floor-really wash it from her maternal grandmother, Sonia, a cleaning woman who is now barely clinging to life.

You have to do the floor at least twice, Sonia taught her. Go over it once, and you'll leave streaks of dirt. Sonia used to grab the mop out of the narrator's hands when she didn't apply enough force. "Why are you washing as if you haven't eaten in three days?" she would demand.