Chapter Two considers the legacy of these historical barriers on an individual level through films that feature troubled relations between survivors and specifically Canadian socio-political contexts. It pays particular attention to films that focus on Canada’s WWII history, which does not (at least easily) include a confrontation with the Holocaust. Chapter One establishes absence as a central problematic for Canadian Holocaust cinema. Canadians surrounding the survivors who lack the experience to understand their past).

survivors who have moved to Canada) and those who did not (i.e.

More commonly, Canadian films enact these barriers at the interpersonal level via emotional or cognitive barriers between individuals who experienced the Holocaust (i.e. At the broadest level these barriers function historically, manifesting the geographic distance between Canada and the Holocaust during World War II (WWII). It argues that Canadian films have emphasized experiential barriers that challenge the Holocaust’s representation within a Canadian context. 'This dissertation explores the treatment of the Holocaust in Canadian cinema. I also point out the restitutive ethics of nature and maintain that floods manifest themselves as counterhistoric agents able to reveal and restore historic truth through obscuration and disclosure. The interconnectedness of psychological wounds with geological wounds demonstrates the ethics of nature - a kind of co-healing of persons and places across generations and landscapes (both transgenerational and transhistorical). Through this central trope, I show how psychological post-traumatic healing in Holocaust survivors and geologic post-traumatic healing operate in tandem in the novel, more precisely how the figurative unearthing and working through of traumatic memory across generations parallels the literal unearthing and re-situating of archaeological artefacts across geologic time. In my article on Anne Michaels' fictional work Fugitive Pieces, I introduce the critical concept of liquefaction as thematic leitmotiv that connects psychological, transgenerational trauma to large-scale environmental catastrophes (like floods and hurricanes) across time and place, and across international, national and domestic spaces.

Fugitive pieces by anne michaels