Trauma and affect in a Holocaust survivor's story: Rosita Fanto's novel <i>Rozalia Alone</i>

Abstract My article endeavors to redress the neglect of Rosita Fanto's Rozalia Alone (2010), which deals with a page of history that is less known worldwide, the Holocaust in Romania. Using a trauma studies perspective that mixes with affect theory, the article demonstrates that Rozalia Alone covers in a nutshell the whole magnitude of the late 1930s to early 1940s catastrophe of the Holocaust in Romania. I show what is distinctive about Fanto's narrative strategies in representing real events that happened in two different parts of Romania in 1941 (the Bucharest and the Iași Pogrom), following the story of the main character, Rozalia, the daughter of a Romanian mother and a Jewish father, the sole survivor of her family. Following Efraim Sicher who explained that the writer's “imagination and fantasy do not necessarily impair authenticity,” I first present the Romanian Holocaust, then attempt to place the novel within the paradigm of Holocaust novel. My analysis relies on both classical trauma theory and affect, a combination that is the best to decipher the intricate narrative constructions of Fanto's fiction, while also comparing the novel to the sole other novel that partly deals with the same events, Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt .