Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Conversations with Raymod Federman: Take It or Leave It and The Voice in the Closet

are survivors too), has been framed between the necessity and the impossibility of telling that story. The same old sad story. And I often wonder if perhaps I have not exploited the Holocaust (and my personal experience of it, direct or indirect as it may have been) in order to be able to write those novels. It disturbs me sometimes to think that I am able to write, that I became a writer because of that sordid affair. It's in this sense that I want to write a story that cancels itself as it goes. A need to tell the story and at the same time to erase it forever. But to push this question further. I often ask myself what was my "real" experience of the Holocaust? Or is it rather an "unreal" experience? After all I survived, I was not physically and even mentally wounded, my wrist has no tattoo, my mind seems to function more or less normally, I was not imprisoned in a concentration camp, did not enter the gas chamber. What am I suffering of? Am I perhaps suffering of not having suffered enough? I recently found part of the answer to these questions in a dream I had. Let me tell you about this dream because I think it is extremely important, for me, but also for my work. You know the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzman. It's about the Holocaust. Well, I had the dream before I saw the movie, though of course I must have read about it somewhere. I dreamed that I was having a conversation with Claude Lanzman (I have never met him of course). I assumed that he was a man of my age whose experience of the Holocaust was similar to mine. In this dream I asked Claude Lanzman: why are we, you and I, so obsessed with the Holocaust? You spend a good part of your life making movies about it, and I spend a good part of mine writing novels about it, and yet you and 1 did not directly suffer from the Holocaust. We have no marks on our bodies, our minds function well. In fact, we live rather good, easy, comfortable lives. And suddenly we reached the same conclusion in the dream: what we suffer of, we both said to each other simultaneously, is an absence

—the absence of our parents, brothers and sisters, but also the absence of not having been there totally. Perhaps what we really suffer of is the absence of our own death. And then I woke up. Several months later, I was in Paris, by then I had seen the movie Shoah which moved me and disturbed me greatly, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should try to get in touch with Claude Lanzman and tell him about the dream, and also talk to him about his 99