Essay #1 Fugitive Pieces on Book 1

Carefully read the following excerpt from an essay about the role of memory in Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces:

Both thematically and stylistically, Fugitive Pieces is an exercise in "poetic knowing," an epistemological mode (epistemology: a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge) that Michaels carefully distinguishes from mere knowledge in a meditation on love, poetry, and memory entitled "Cleopatra’s Love" in the March 1994 number of Poetry Canada Review:

The distinction between knowledge and "poetic knowing" resembles the distinction between history and memory. Knowledge/History is essentially amoral: events occurred. "Poetic Knowing"/Memory is inextricable linked with morality: history’s source is event, but memory’s source is meaning. Often what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.
     Memory, like love, gains strength through restatement, reaffirmation; in a culture, through ritual, tradition, stories, art. Memory courts our better selves; it helps us recognize the importance of deed; we learn from pleasure just as we learn from pain. And when memory evokes consideration of what might have been or been prevented, memory becomes redemptive. As Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai wrote: "to remember is a kind of hope."
                                                                                                                           (15)

Or as Jakob puts it in the novel:

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
                                                                                                                         (138)

Acutely aware though she doubtless is of the problems of historical imagination and literary representation,² Michaels nevertheless attempts in Fugitive Pieces "to speak of events…that one has not witnessed, that one has not lived through personally but has absorbed through the culture, through the family, through the home" for, as she told Douglas Fetherling in an interview published shortly after the appearance of the novel, she felt "an obligation to establish some relationship" with "the largest and most devastating reality" of the twentieth century "in order to try to understand how one emerges" from such an event with a capacity for "faith" and the capability to "move towards a place of love in the world" ("Narrative Moves" 16, 18).
www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/michaels/crit.htm

Using specific examples from the text, write an essay that analyzes how Jakob emerges from the events of the Holocaust "with a capacity for 'faith' and the capability to 'move to a place of love in the world.'"  Does memory become redemptive for Jakob?  Does it become "a kind of hope"?  (Use this as a critical lens)

Be specific and avoid mere plot summary.

HMK: Continue reading Fugitive Pieces and finish the book for Friday.