On the Far Side of Normality
On the Far Side of Normality

Summary/Abstract: The very existence of the generation which I am about to try and introduce is doubtful. That is to say it does exist, but only in the minds of a number of individuals - the members of this supposed generation - who know each other largely through hearsay or perhaps on the basis of one another’s writings. It is not unusual for generations, movements or trends to be designated or "discovered" without their representatives getting to hear about it until after the fact (if at all), - in his manifesto, for example, the American painter Ron B. Kitaj, suspected any artist with a "multiple identity" of being a "diasporist", irrespective of their cultural background, epoch, or selfdeclared affiliation. In what follows we will be talking about declared identities only: about an image which nine Central and Eastern European Jewish creative intellects have endeavoured to build around themselves, as well as a myth which they have tried to make acceptable to their contemporaries, that is, to those born into the third generation after the holocaust. It is a familiar intellectual "recirculation" process - the intellectual presents herself as the most sensitive antenna to the traces of the social agent, and sets herself the task of transcribing the thoughts and moods that lie latent in the polity.

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