Semansky's stories, poems, and essays appear regularly in literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky analyzes the nature of memory in Christa Wolf's short story,"Exchanging Glances."

On one level Christa Wolf s autobiographical story, "Exchanging Glances," is a German woman recounting the events surrounding the end of World War II. On another level, the story is about the very nature of identity itself, and the ways in which memory can both liberate and imprison the person remembering.

Wolf's narrator tells the story of her family's flight from the advancing Russian Army, but in the process she also tells the story of her own emotional and psychological development. In this way she is both a subject (that is, the person doing the remembering) and an object (that is, the person being remembered). As subject, the narrator lays out the details of the April day her family left...