Cricket in a Fist is composed of seven stories about a secular Jewish family settled in Canada. The central character, Ginny Reilly, is raised by her mother and grandmother, who emigrated from the Netherlands after surviving the Holocaust. When she is thirty-seven, Ginny suffers a head injury that causes temporary memory loss and a permanent personality change, and she becomes a self-help guru. Following a cultural crisis such as the Jewish Holocaust, a family may disconnect itself from cultural memory, and a family without cultural memory, like an amnesiac patient, must reformulate a sense of identity. As the characters in Cricket in a Fist grapple for an unblemished identity in Canada, they try to dismiss their unruly history. Analogously, the conscious formation of self is the basis of Ginny’s self-help philosophy, which urges wilful forgetfulness as a means to cast off all traces of irresolvable ambiguity and traumatic memory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:UNB.1882/178 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Lewis, Naomi K. |
| Contributors | Ball, J. C. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | 674701 bytes, 520815 bytes, 732228 bytes, application/pdf, text/xml, text/html |
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