zblog

Having previously posted on z from Allen S. Weiss’ Ingestion/ A Personal Gastronomic Alphabet, Part III in Cabinet magazine, z quickly learned how the web works and was contacted by Allen S. Weiss to inform z of another z story written in his book Autobiographie dans un chou farci he translated a section for z, which moved z to tearz, and post here for others to enjoy the beauty of his words and unique story of z!

Origins easily disappear. My father - to whose memory I wish to dedicate this fragment of a memoir - survived, in Hungary, one of the most horrendous events of history, the Holocaust. He lost everything: home, family, city, country. Even his name. I’m convinced that only when survivors can laugh, with that mad laugh that both wounds and heals, can they seal their victory. A more-than-pyrrhic victory, a victory over nothingness, a victory over Death. And yet, as we can well imagine, this maddest of laughs is rarely possible. However, there are all sorts of monuments: certain may even behidden in the corner of one’s mouth, like a bite of superb food, or like a raging toothache. Such monuments are no less sincere, no less profound, because of their smallness and hiddenness. Perhaps the greatest monument of all would be miniature, portable, ephemeral. A culinary monument, for cuisine brings joy and life from the jaws of death. A stuffed cabbage as monument - why not!? For cuisine is a prime site of memory, and the mouth a topology for all that is essential - eroticism, language, taste / dissent, aggression, violence - source of life, source of death. Otherwise stated, according to good dialectical form, the story that begins as tragedy ends as farce.

And the farce is me. Arriving in America after the war, after the camps, after the loss, my father wished to change his name, thus Laszlo Weisz [SZ] became Leslie Weiss [SS]. I had always found this to be a curious choice, and yet I never got a satisfactory explanation to this strange “americanization” by changing a Hungarian name to a German one. Especially after the Holocaust. Perhaps this transformation of SZ into SS was a manner of marking, of scarring, of bearing the wounds, the loss, the uprootnedness, the death - all in silence, like tattoos. The S accentuates by attenuating, being the scar of the wound Z. It reveals the Z a contrario. Or is it I who activate the meaning of the dreaded Z? What can this SZ mean? What might the Z, that rarest of letters, add to a name? For Victor Hugo, it’s lightening, it’s God. However for others it’s the hated letter, which throughout European history was often threatened with elimination. Remember that exclamation from King Lear [II.ii.65]: “Thou whoreson zed! / thou unnecessary letter!” But why? In his book entitled S/Z, Roland Barthes explains that in Balzac’s novel Sarrasine [and here I condense]: “The Z thus falls through a trap-door…it cuts, it strikes out, it streaks [zebre]…it is the letter of deviance…the wound of lack…S and Z thus exist in an inverted graphic relationship : they are the same letter, seen from the other side of the mirror.” True indeed! The Z is superfluous. The Z is mysterious. The Z is dangerous. It’s the letter of the zigzag, source of uncertainty. It’s the evil double, violence itself inscribed within words, an exterminating, eschatological letter. And here I am, Weiss [SS] speaking
of the disappeared Weisz [SZ] - the return of the repressed incarnate.

the book can be purchased here through amazon france for further reading. thankz Allen!