Notes on migration, writing, and intergenerational transmission

Abstract

In the mid-thirties and at the age of 20, Lifka travels form his na-tive Poland to Montevideo, and settles here, having left his family behind in that corner of the world. His sister and his brother-in- law await him. During his boat trip, Lifka writes in a notebook. The family he manages to start in Uruguay ignores the existence of this notebook until Lifka becomes old. After his death, the notebook gets lost. Last year it is found in a box and starts being translated to reveal a myriad unknown characteristic of Lifka.
The notebook could be Lifka’s attempt to while time away in the solitude of his trip on board of the Asturias steamboat. It is
also an effort to start processing a migration which surely has its traumatic points, but many questions remain open.
The paper deals with Lifka’s notes and writings and tries to ap-proach, from a basically psychoanalytic perspective, the questions that emerged with the discovery of the notebook with black covers and its content.