Italian High Heels (Włoskie szpilki)

Abstract

Content and Interpretation ItalianHigh Heels is a collection of seven autobiographical stories about traumatic adolescence in postwar Poland. The main plot follows the daughter’s dysfunctional relationshipwith her compassionlessmother, whose experience of the Shoah has rendered her incapable of empathy. Tulli is primarily interested in the topic of human subjectivity, andwith characterswhobelieve themselves to bemasters of their own fate– abelief that can only ever be an illusion since their lives are shaped to a great extent by their backgrounds as well as their parents’ past. The girl’s mother, a Polish Jew and survivor ofAuschwitzwhonowworks as a sociologist, struggles in silencewith the traumaof the Holocaust, isolatingherself fromherpast experiences in the camps.Maintaining achinup attitude at all costs, concealing the traumatic memories behind a façade of normality, she believes she has found away to keep the past fromaffecting the present, to keep her experiences from impacting the child. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, themother unknowingly transmits her postwar trauma to her daughter, where it grows into contempt and hatred – an infinite recursion between one individual and another, usually weaker, individual. The mother does not realise that the main source of her child’s problems is her own unprocessed, unspoken past. When the girl begins to suffer from the typical symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including insomnia, sleep disorders, and recurring nightmares, she finds that she is perpetually tired and has difficulty concentrating. Eventually, overcome by the endless feelings of exhaustionandpowerlessness, shebegins todisplayantisocial behaviour.Her inability to deal with her emotions results in outbursts of rage. The effects of past trauma are also reflected in the language of the narration. Tulli’s prose has been dubbed linguistic literature: a technique by which, with the aid of numerous metaphors and symbolism, the author presents the drama of Jewish origins as a flaw, and otherness as a dead weight, a secret of the past that conveys its burden of suffering to the present. As she writes, “the past weighs most, it lies in the body heavy like a boulder” (Tulli, 2003, p. 32). This notion of the burden which weighs on