Mamzer

Mamzer is both a name imposed on a child and the word through which she later interprets a life marked by exclusion, betrayal, and violence. The term first tells her that she does not belong to her family; in a later moment of mortal danger, she understands it as regret and exclusion bound up with what has been lost. Its recurrence joins the shame inflicted on her in childhood to the identity she makes for herself afterward.

Discovery and Exclusion

For years, the girl does not know why people look at her and whisper. She suspects her appearance or shabby clothes, not the fact that she is regarded as illegitimate. Before her mother’s death, no one spoke openly about her parentage. Afterward, a girl at the greengrocer’s tells her that her mother spent ten years living with a handsome painter who lived two blocks away. The girl pieces together what her brothers have already called her: Mamzer means that she is not part of the family.

The word gives a name to an exclusion she has experienced without being able to explain it. Her brothers know the family secret, and their treatment of her makes that knowledge bodily: they hit her when they tire of hitting one another, and use her body as they please. The insult therefore does more than distinguish her parentage. It accompanies a household in which her supposed lack of belonging leaves her exposed to abuse, while the people who know the truth do not make it easier for her to understand or escape.

Her father’s place in this scene is marked by silence. She knows she is not his child, and believes everyone knows except him; she looks toward him as her brothers pack their belongings. The cold soup she cannot finish and the scrap of dry bread he gives her before they leave make the family’s departure concrete, but do not resolve the uncertainty and rejection attached to the word. The term names her status in the family without offering her a place within it.

Repetition, Betrayal, and Flight

The name returns when the family is about to be taken away during the German occupation. Three days earlier, no one in the street knew of their Jewish roots; after she sends their names and address to the Germans, neighbors who had been their friends spit at her when she goes to the market. The family is preparing to leave with its belongings on a wheelbarrow, bound for the Jewish cemetery near Babi Yar. In her later recollection, envy has driven her to inform on them. Mamzer thus belongs not only to what was done to her, but to the betrayal she committed.

As her father goes to fetch the wheelbarrow, she slips away. She carries a thick sweater, trousers, socks, and shoes taken from one of her brothers’ suitcases, along with her father’s shaving knife. She runs through streets where people seem to be staring and avoids groups of German and Ukrainian uniforms, which appear to be working together. The word returns in her thoughts as she flees. Its repetition makes the label feel less like an explanation she can set aside than a verdict carried with her, even as she has no destination in mind.

Her flight does not spare her from witnessing what follows. She later recalls hiding in tall grass among a clump of trees, barely twenty metres from the edge of the ravine, and watching her father and two older brothers die at Babi Yar. In the later scene, memories of that day surface while her finger throbs and she has seven minutes left to live. She asks herself whether an entire life can be regretted. The answer is not reduced to the betrayal alone: Mamzer holds together the childhood conviction that she did not belong and the adult knowledge that she helped deliver her family to death.

The Word as Retrospective Meaning

The later recollection enlarges Mamzer beyond the discovery of illegitimacy. The girl had learned the word through cruelty and neighborhood gossip; the dying woman gives it a wider meaning, identifying it with what she has done, with regret and exclusion, and with the simultaneous presence of life and death in moments frozen around loss. That meaning does not erase the difference between being harmed and harming others. Instead, it makes the original wound inseparable from the choices and consequences that follow it.

The term also marks a break in identity. On the day she watches her family die, she decides to live the rest of her life as someone else. This decision follows the discovery that she has been treated as an outsider, but it is not a simple escape from the past: the word resurfaces years later at the point of death. Its return reveals the limit of becoming someone else. A changed identity can shape the life that follows, while the memory of exclusion and betrayal remains available to break through it.

Gnosis and the Reversal of Harm

In the final reflection, Mamzer is placed beside Gnosis, described as a state of child’s play freed from express intentions. The passage imagines a childhood in which the girl’s mother had lived and she had not seen her brothers die at Babi Yar; in that alternate life, she would not have forced two Kazakh brothers to kill each other with their bare hands while she watched, dressed as her mother. The contrast connects her adult violence to the destruction of the childhood she actually experienced without presenting that connection as an excuse.

The maternal disguise sharpens the passage’s attention to identity: she appears as her mother while repeating violence born from a history of loss. Against the imagined freedom of childhood, the word Mamzer carries the weight of an adulthood formed through exclusion, regret, and acts that reproduce suffering. Its recurrence is therefore structural as well as personal. First it explains why the child believes she does not belong; later it names the painful joining of her victimization, her betrayal, and the violence she inflicts. The word keeps those parts of her story in view at once, refusing to let either the original wound or its consequences stand alone.