Twenty years ago, Lydia Flem « emptied his parents’ house » just disappeared, each object, each writing discovered bursting on the surface of his consciousness a bubble of buried memory.
Twenty years later, the disappearance of her companion Maurice Olander, whom she modestly and tenderly evokes in the introduction to this work, plunges her back into mourning and into this lack which has never left her of her dear deceased parents. This time they no longer evoke them through objects, but they themselves become “objects” of its evocation.
How these camp survivors, one lived to forget and the other chose to live not to forget. By telling them, Lydia Flem brings them to life, recounts their life, their survival, their resistance, the impressive resistance of her mother, although Jewish and “barely” French…
With sobriety, in a style devoid of pathos, we think of Sebald furtively evoked, she erects a literary monument to her parents, gives the memory a material importance in the form of work as they say in sewing, her mother’s profession. Her daughter speaks of the transmission of memory rather than of duty: the psychoanalyst does it through writing, because, in fact, writing lasts, and, if the Jews have survived the centuries, including the terrible twentieth, it This is particularly thanks to the Book, to transmission through writing. For Lydia Flem, May it be sweet to the living is his Old and New Testament… or rather loving test.
