Allen S. Weiss's Autobiography via Stuffed Cabbage

Allen S. Weiss, author of over thirty works on acousmatic theater, voice, radio, landscape, and gastronomy, has published an unconventional autobiography titled "Autobiographie dans un chou farci" (Éditions Mercure de France). Rather than a linear narrative, Weiss uses the stuffed cabbage as a central metaphor, exploring his Hungarian Jewish heritage, the Holocaust, and his intellectual journey through culinary digressions. The book interweaves reflections on Barthes, Bachelard, Artaud, Kafka, and Deleuze, alongside recipes and restaurant menus. Weiss, also the American translator of Valère Novarina and director of his play "Théâtre des Oreilles," earned a doctorate on Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in the late 1970s. Born in the South Bronx to a Hungarian family decimated by Nazi extermination, he discovered France and the Aubrac region. The work humorously and eruditely addresses memory, identity, and autobiographical writing, proposing a miniature, portable, ephemeral monument to the Shoah. It concludes that identity is always approximate and autobiography often novelistic, emphasizing montage, hybridization, and fusion as conditions of inventiveness.