Literature of Agony and Triumph: An Encounter with the Holocaust

Abstract

RECENTLY, A STUDENT who had previously taken a course with me stopped me on my way to class to tell me, with some eagerness, about two movies he had seen on the subject of the One film, he said, a thriller about the tracking down of a Nazi war criminal, with shots of concentration camp victims thrown in. caught an ironic note in his voice. He wasn't exactly approving. other film was really crude, he continued, maybe pornographic. He was studying my reactions. Well, the movies are really cashing in on the he added. This student was one of fifteen upperclassmen who enrolled in a course recently offered in Literature of the Holocaust. The course was part of the literature offerings in the Department of English at Marist College, a small liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. felt good about the student's reactions to the movies he had seen. Perhaps the course had given him a standard for evaluating works which treated the He knew that a subject of great import was being commercialized and vulgarized. offered the course because felt that through literature, through select works of autobiography, fiction, drama, and poetry, students could gain a special insight into a profoundly tragic event of our century-a desecration of human life perhaps without parallel. The literature of the Holocaust, believed, could also give students unique opportunities for self-confrontation, self-understanding, and the enlargement of sensibility. I am a human being, writes Abraham Heschel, but what have to acquire is being human. A course in the literature of the Holocaust, thought, might make a small contribution to that difficult acquisition. All students in the group read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel's Night, Andre Schwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just, Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy, Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, Nellie Sachs' 0 The Chimneys, and a variety of short pieces in poetry and prose. My selection of basic readings for the one-semester course was determined by a number of considerations in addition to literary significance. wanted to include works in a number of genres, works written by survivors as well as by writers who did not experience the Holocaust directly, works which showed the impact of the catastrophe on non-Jews as well as Jews, and works which could consti-