as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek aptly explain, "requires steering a course between

holding on and letting go" and "lies in the dialectical, ceaseless activity of remembering

and forgetting, assimilating and discarding."219 Herman's problem lies in the fact that he

cannot steer his course between letting go and holding on. With the murder of his entire

family by the Nazis and his subsequent immigration to America, Herman has lost almost

everything that used to anchor him in the familiarized space of psychic and interpersonal

history. The Holocaust has left his ontological landscape totally ruined and his layers of

self starkly stripped. Similarly, reflecting on her current barren life after the war, Tamara

states, "'My life seems to have been peeled away like the skin of an onion'" (100). The

same goes for Herman, who survived the Holocaust but has become emotionally and

spiritually bankrupt. To use another comparison, Herman is like the persona in Charlotte

Delbo's poem who returns to the world from a Nazi concentration camp only to feel

bewilderment and despair, which she poignantly expresses in the line, "I am here in front

of life / as though facing a dress / I can no longer wear."220

 Herman is an utterly uprooted human being who can never feel at home again in

the world after his traumatic experiences. "Reduced to the positive-psychological basic

content of the idea, home is security," Jean Amery explains. And "homesickness," as he

continues to assert, is "alienation from the self."221


 Home is security. .. At home we are in full command of the dialectics of
 knowledge and recognition, of trust and confidence. Since we know them, we
 recognize them and we trust ourselves to speak and to act. The entire field of
 the related words loyal, familiar, confidence, to trust, to entrust, trusting belongs in
 the broader psychological area of feeling secure. One feels secure, however, where
 no chance occurrence is to be expected, nothing completely strange to be feared. To
 live in one's homeland means that what is already known to us occurs before our
 eyes again and again, in slight variants. ... If one has no home one becomes
 subject to disorder, confusion, desolation.222