It’s difficult for me to combine the two halves of Molnar’s book. On one hand, she relates a deeply personal account of generational trauma. All of her grandparents survived the Holocaust. And her lyric essay, “Minutes: A Remembrance,” considers what effect that might have had on her life. Where she layers literary influence with concepts around Jewish mysticism that involve being versus void versus absolute presence in a void. It’s a challenging essay interested in straining the bounds of reason. Is it possible to be haunted by a dead grandmother? The writer says, Yes. And she explicitly recognizes how hard it might be for her reader to understand that. Is it possible for the body to physically respond to generational trauma? The writer says, Yes. With a variety of arguments that draw on her own physiology along with cited sources, like Mark Wolynn’s book about generational trauma—in particular a scientific study where lab rats physically react to stimuli only their grandparents would have been exposed to.
For me, Molnar’s lyric essay, “Minutes: A Remembrance” comes closest to the layering complexity I appreciated in her first book, CHORUS. For instance, what does it mean for a child to feel she should perform up to her grandfather’s silence, where she’s assuming his silence is a long term effect of surviving the concentration camps? The book’s lyric essay is expansive and ambitious in its scope. It registers what has proven difficult for the writer to explain, joining together speculative and mystical lines of reason. And communicating to the reader why they make sense on a personal level.
It’s not entirely clear to me, however, how this statement attaches to her erasures on the antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Perhaps on a historical level, given the rationale this text provided for the Nazi government in Germany—a connection Molnar draws briefly in the final pages of the book. However, given the very personal nature of “Minutes: A Remembrance,” and the very abstract nature of the erasure (at least in what it is literally saying), I wasn’t quite able to draw connections that explained why this particular text would serve what I take to be the book’s very personal purpose. Or I was directed to a logic that went something like:
In this line of reasoning, what I feel most uncertain of (or uninformed of) is what the erased version of the The Protocols produces. I have no doubt the original text is a series of false accusations leading that writer to an abstraction he could frame as “truth.” That its argument relies on insinuation of injury. That its premise A leading to premise B would necessarily justify hateful and violent responses. Where “hate” and “violence” fill a reader with a sense of purpose. This is the “power” Molnar revisits throughout the erasure. I can draw an implicit connection between what is phrased as “(power)” in the erasure and the being versus void versus limitless light part of the “Minutes: A Remembrance” essay. How can language conceive and communicate what power would look like, so that it felt like fruit a reader could pluck from a tree? Is there a simplistic versatility that The Protocols tapped into that, in a more complex light, could resemble the limitless light from Jewish mysticism?
This might relate to Molnar’s intention for erasing language from The Protocols of the Elders. To understand what readers of that “book” would have gained, or the seed of provocation, what would have drawn readers to it. What is there to those whose embrace what they’ve long thought to be true in a conspiracy. And now it’s more than just that truth to them. Act now! How can a book be what instigates a mob?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.