| Mavis Gallant |
‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant
February 5, 2021
Mavis Gallant was a Canadian writer, born in 1922. She is known as a short story writer, although other works include the novels: Green Water, Green Sky (1959), A Fairly Good Time (1970), and an essay collection, Paris Notebooks (1986). Working as a journalist for The Montreal Standard, she was one of the first to witness and report on the photos of the liberation of the Nazi camps. In 1972, Gallant wrote that ‘the first pictures of death camps […] stopped a whole generation in its tracks’. Having settled in Paris in 1975, where she would spend the rest of her life, Gallant consistently challenged the prevalence of anti-semitism in France. Joseph Ballan argued that Gallant wrestled with Michael Levine’s theory of the ‘belated witness’ – a narrative figure who, although not a Holocaust survivor themselves, inherits its traumatic legacies – by illustrating the absence of such figures in postwar culture. And while this interpretation is more manifest in such stories as The Old Place and Old Friends, in which Gallant explores the explicit experience of Holocaust survivors, The Ice Wagon offers a different, but tangential example of postwar trauma. The story, published in 1963, offers a tender, if painful, exploration of intergenerational conflict, essentially showing that while children can learn from their parents’ mistakes, parents seldom learn from theirs.