Remembrance as a Vis: Avigdor Dagan's allegories of destruction and restitution

This is an examination of the novels of the late Czech-Israeli writer Avigdor Dagan (Viktor Fischl) as veiled allegories of the disorientation the Holocaust inflicted on individuals and on humankind as a whole. Central to the novels is the narrative attempt to preserve the memory of a world violated and destroyed. However, the remembrances of the past with which Dagan's narrators ceaselessly occupy themselves do not function as a cult of the dead, but rather transubstantiate into life. Dagan's novels can be read as allegories of restitution that assert traditional patterns of meaning and human dignity; however, they also show the irreversible rupture of those patterns.