Fugitive Pieces: An Analysis

“If an institution is to be an institution, it must to some extent break with the past, keep the memory of the past, while inaugurating something absolutely new” (Caputo 6). In this quote from Jacques Derrida’s 1994 conversation Deconstruction in a Nutshell, Derrida’s submits that the use of deconstruction within literature should facilitate fluidity between the past and contemporary literature. This negotiation with time appears active in the 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels as the two mingling narratives of two men explore two involuntary poetic paths. It may seem absurd to explain the direction of two human lives as involuntary, but the definition behind this word, “done without will or conscious control” (Oxford), effectively
As a high ranking Jewish officer at Theresienstadt’s Nazi concentration camp, Murmelstein testifies to the film audience about the murder, manipulation and maintenance he witnessed in an imprisoned society overrun by political propaganda. In his estimation, camp prisoners were comparable to the living dead and that “man is working like an automation” (The Last), because the mind has lost touch with reality and subsistence. If a detainee is liberated, the ordinary world is suddenly foreign making integration difficult to achieve. The new world structure collides with lost souls from the captive society that no longer find meaning outside of the death camp; there is no will to start life all over again encouraging clashes with everyone. As Murmelstein speculates about his own life, he concludes that this psychosis can only be released with death. This radicle absolution is necessary because documentation about the ghetto camps embellished society was destroyed by German soldiers after the hybrid operation closed, according to Theresienstadt. By the film end, Murmelstein recalls his version of life at the concentration camp effortlessly and simultaneously outlines that any Jew not killed by German soldiers are physically free, but emotionally
As Fugitive Pieces progresses with emotional narrative, the present day activities of Jakob and Ben become secondary to the difficult circumstances of their post-Holocaust worlds. “To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into” (Michaels 48). This quote by Jakob in Fugitive Pieces demonstrates the past tragedy of his family has damaged his freedom with a sense of emotional loss, just as Murmelstein confirms is a result of post-Holocaust trauma. If we look at Ben, he appears to grapple with the idea that his parent’s freedom is somehow unrepairable, “My mother stands behind my father and his head leans against her. As he eats, she strokes his hair. Like a miraculous circuit, each draws strength from the other” (Michaels 294). Murmelstein testifies in The Last of the Unjust about the devastating decisions and actions of German’s at the Theresienstadt’s Nazi concentration camp because he is ready to disclose to the audience that Jewish people who survived the Holocaust presently resemble the living dead; Jakob and Ben appear to argue in Fugitive Pieces that this theory is