Original scientific paper

Stories and Storytelling in Vilma Vukelić’s Memoir a Past Rescued From Oblivion: The Shaping of an Identity

Zlata Živaković-Kerže
Veronika Završki ; Filozofski fakultet, Zagreb

Abstract

Vilma Vukelić’s memoir A Past Rescued from Oblivion is a personal memoir in which the author describes her private relationships in the first-person narrative to show the zeitgeist that formed her worldview, shaped the social norms of both actions and thoughts, and influenced the search for the memoir’s author’s own identity. The book is an autobiography of a resilient and rebellious female personality shown through the history of a wealthy Jewish family in the tumultuous 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The author wrote the memoir using fairy tales, legends, parables, jokes, and stories of her childhood, her life, and town tales, thus describing her ethnicity and the religious and linguistic environment in which she lived. The paper aims to show the types of identity and identity categories derived from Vilma’s stories and point out the construction of a plural identity. It also wants to show the influence of the patriarchal social order on the shaping of a woman’s identity, in which the authority of the father is natural and indisputable.

Keywords

memoirs; writer Vilma Vukelić; Osijek; 19th and early 20th centuries; the shaping of an identity

Hrčak ID:

302440

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/302440

Publication date:

21.4.2023.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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