Out past metonymy in the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay engages performative writing to enact a scene of metonymic remembering in the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin on the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi. In 2019, I traveled to Poland to write about empty shoes, metonymy, and Holocaust memory and found myself caught off guard by a destroyed pre-war Jewish cemetery. This essay traces my excessive, defamiliarized remembering as I spun out past metonymy and back again, grappling with remembering in(to) a landscape of emptiness. As it marks both my contemporary remembering and the scene of the cemetery, defamiliarization expands metonymically to encompass the ontology of performance itself.