Journal of Austrian Studies

Abstract:

Alya Rakhmanova's autobiographically inflected text is read here as the author's literary attempt to come to terms with the emotional trauma of being expelled from her home country and her ensuing loss of identity. In addition to coping with the difficulties of an immigrant existence in the economically depressed Vienna of the interwar years, the narrator of Rakhmanova's text continues to long for her former home country and her past life there. Her diary becomes the space where the narrator interacts both with her culture of origin and with her new culture. The writing process allows her to define herself in relationship to both cultures, to explore the relationship between the two, to decide how much of each to incorporate in her current life, and, finally, to reconfigure her cultural identity.