‘Lost in the Multiplicity of Impersonations?’ The Jew and the Holocaust in Post-War British Fiction

Abstract

In literary studies, in spite of the growing deliberation with which questions of identity, ethnicity and difference are studied, no attention has yet been paid to the ways in which British post-war fiction has represented the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This article is an attempt to initiate such interest by considering three novels – Litvinoff’s The Lost Europeans (1960), Benedictus’s A Twentieth Century Man (1978) and Waterstone’s A Passage of Lives (1996) – that mark key moments in the response to the Holocaust.