Holocaustul între memorie locală și globală: America de peste pogrom de Cătălin Mihuleac

This essay explores how a Holocaust counter-narrative can be constructed in response to historical negationism, Romanian exceptionalism, and ‘ethnocentric mindscape’, as described by Ana Bărbulescu. In America de peste Pogrom [America Over Pogrom] (2014), Cătălin Mihuleac reconstructs the Iași pogrom, challenging contemporary antisemitic and negationist discourses. The novel exposes the complicity of public figures, police, and civilians in the Jewish extermination under Ion Antonescu’s regime, thus creating a fictional narrative closer to the historical truth than other postcommunist discourses that denied the accountability of the Romanian people. Through the character Suzy Bernstein, who uncovers Romania’s genocidal past, Mihuleac’s work serves as a memorial and postmemorial metanarrative, reflecting on historical trauma, the social and historical conditions that made the Holocaust possible in Romania, on its impact on contemporary Romania and on the accessibility of Holocaust knowledge nowadays. The novel, while ignored by Romanian critics, has been well-received in Western Europe, highlighting the differing priorities in Holocaust memory between Eastern and Western societies. I am also interested in the circulation of Mihuleac’s novel. If the Romanian critics ignored the novel, it has been well received in the France and German and was awarded important prizes as well as apologetic reviews. My hypothesis for the lack of interest on Romanian critics’ behalf and, in contrast, of the interest shown by Western publishers and critics is the marginalization of the Holocaust memory in Romania and the centrality of it in the Western society, much preoccupied with keeping the victims’ memory alive and defending it (by legislating it) from negationist and conspiracy tendencies associated with contemporary antisemitic ideologies.