The article examines the relationship between two types of narration, the autobiographical and the automythographical, and two concepts of time upon which they depend, the linear and the cyclical respectively. The analysis is focused on the use of the strategy of recurrence, i.e. having the same episode from the author’s life recur in various stylistic variants in the course of a single autobiographical story line. The case in point is Artur Sandauer’s Zapiski z martwego miasta (Notes from a Dead City), where iteration is used not to illumine the author’s experience but rather to establish and fi x its irreparable inaccessibility. It seems that the author’s formal games with the conventions of traditional autobiography are connected with problem of Jewish assimilation in Polish society.