Abstract
To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.
Highlights
Beatrice and Virgil, the long-awaited novel by Yann Martel that followed the author’s phenomenally successful, prize-winning Life of Pi, was a colossal commercial and critical failure
Dorina Daniella Vasiloiu argues that the allegorical story of the Holocaust victims as taxidermied animals intends to show that “[i]n the same fashion that mounted animals are mere copies of the living ones, experiences [even the Holocaust] lose their initial emotional authenticity once expressed in words” (Vasiloiu 2010, pp. 144–45)
Jenni Adams notes the ambiguity of the animal genocide/Jewish genocide allegory and approaches the employment of the animals as
Summary
Beatrice and Virgil, the long-awaited novel by Yann Martel that followed the author’s phenomenally successful, prize-winning Life of Pi, was a colossal commercial and critical failure. Whereas the literary responses to the Holocaust by survivors emerge from their own experience and contain the component of the testimony, the Holocaust representations of second-generation writers are bound to fictionalize the event of the Holocaust, which they can only attempt to imagine. Liebrecht has published a number of sensitive, critically praised and award-winning collections of short stories that explore the impact of the Holocaust experience of parents-survivors on post-Holocaust family life. In her interviews, Liebrecht confessed “that she knows practically nothing about her parents’ past: how many brothers and sisters they had, what these siblings were.”. As the following discussion will show, this consciousness irrevocably affected the Jewish mentality and transformed the Jewish sense of being and acting in the world
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