Abstract
This paper sets out to demonstrate the changes that post-Holocaust fiction has been undergoing since around the turn of the new millennium. It analyzes the highly innovative and often provocative approaches to the Holocaust and its memory found in Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust—a scathing satire on the personal and institutional exploitation of Holocaust commemoration, manifested in the commodification of the historical trauma in what has been termed “Shoah business”. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the Holocaust by popular culture. This paper focuses on Reich’s critical response to the cult of victimhood and the unhealthy competition for Holocaust primacy, corresponding with the growth of a “victim culture”. It also explores other thematic aspects of the author’s satire—the abuse of the term “Holocaust” for personal, political and ideological purposes; attempts to capitalize on the suffering of millions of victims; the trivialization of this tragedy; conflicts between particularists and universalists in their attitude to the Shoah; and criticism of Holocaust-centered Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to show how Tova Reich has enriched post-Holocaust fiction by presenting a comic treatment of false victimary discourse, embodied by a fraudulent survivor and a whole gallery of inauthentic characters. This paper highlights the novel’s originality, which enables it to step outside the frame of traditional Holocaust fiction.
Highlights
Post-Holocaust authors who have only vicarious experience of the Holocaust are obviously aware that their artistic response to the mass genocide must be different from the writings of those who have witnessed this historical tragedy at first hand. This is the reason why second- and third-generation authors are searching for new narrative modes and strategies that are distinct from testimonies and from the more traditional Holocaust fiction of survivor-writers
The bitingly satirical tone of Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust may provoke and upset many a reader, it has doubtlessly enriched the body of American Holocaust literature
The author’s satire targets the culture of Holocaust memory exploitation and the abuse of the commemoration of this historical tragedy, which she presents as a false exploitation of the legacy of the mass murder of European Jewry, carried out for political and financial purposes
Summary
Post-Holocaust authors who have only vicarious experience of the Holocaust are obviously aware that their artistic response to the mass genocide must be different from the writings of those who have witnessed this historical tragedy at first hand This is the reason why second- and third-generation authors are searching for new narrative modes and strategies that are distinct from testimonies and from the more traditional Holocaust fiction of survivor-writers. One of the works that has broken all the above-mentioned tenets and sparked particular controversy is the provocative novel My Holocaust (2007) by the Jewish American writer Tova Reich (born in 1942) Her parents are not Holocaust survivors—her father grew up in the Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), but he left Poland before World War II The aim of this article is to explore in which aspects Reich’s novel enriches Holocaust fiction and is innovative within its genre
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