Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka Tahneer Oksman (bio) Rachel Dean-Ruzicka. Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2017. "What might be a more productive social justice project than liberal multiculturalism?" (10). Rachel Dean-Ruzicka poses this wide-ranging question about halfway through the introduction to her monograph, Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. She engages with the problem by zeroing in on young adult (YA) Holocaust literature, mostly memoirs and novels published or republished in the past forty years, asking what close readings of these works can reveal about literary encounters with history and difference. Dean-Ruzicka builds on the ideas of some of the most compelling political and cultural theorists of our time, from Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Wendy Brown to Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Dipping into their various frameworks along the way, she uses the lens of YA Holocaust literature to examine how literature can potentially complicate notions of difference to expand impressions of what, in Judith Butler's terminology, are all too commonly, and limitedly, determined to be "grievable lives." Dean-Ruzicka's project is rooted in a resistance to what she describes as the promotion of "tolerance and toleration language," a reductive approach to identity and difference that often ignores broader systems of power and privilege as well as the historical dynamics that determine how such structures emerge and unfold (2). Under the veneer of tolerance discourse, citizens are encouraged to simply "live and let live," a stance that compels passivity and reticence instead of action and resistance in the name of social justice, and that also encourages a "troubling relativism" (152). At its core, she explains, tolerance discourse suggests "disapproval itself" as its "central unspoken element" (8). Dean-Ruzicka posits "the ability to embrace difference" as a counterweight, describing this capacity as, in her terminology, a form of "cosmopolitan engagement"—a direct and involved confrontation with, and embrace of, Others (7, 9). Using YA literature about the Holocaust as her case study, an apt subset of literature given her pedagogical aims, she turns over a variety of stories, fiction and nonfiction, conventional prose-based texts and those built around photography or in comics, to determine which might promote such active engagement. Dean-Ruzicka divides her analysis into five discrete sections, a meaningfully constructed scheme that begins with a reading of Anne Frank and concludes [End Page 375] with literature starring Neo-Nazi characters. With its structure, the book implicitly asks readers to engage with questions of why certain texts come to be considered part of the category of Holocaust literature; the book also continually demands a reading of the past in the context of an urgent, always relevant present. In her first chapter, "Finding the Other in Anne Frank," the author astutely argues that the over-reliance on Anne Frank as an emblem of those who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators presents a variety of problems. Not only is Frank's Diary "misleadingly hopeful," ending as it does before members of the Annex were captured, sent to concentration camps, and, excepting Otto Frank, killed, but it also presents "few glimpses into Jewish culture's actual differences," given the Frank family's assimilated, generally nonreligious background (28; 31, italics in original). Dean-Ruzicka holds up, as evidence, the many problematic creative responses to Frank's text, which often involve an over-identification with her that glosses over her Jewishness. In other words, Frank's Diary, which happens to be "the most widely anthologized piece of literature, of any sort, for young adult readers in the United States," seems to have become such a cultural cornerstone precisely because it is so easy to forget that the author/narrator was Jewish (22). In her second chapter, "The Complexity of Jewish Lives," Dean-Ruzicka goes on to consider a variety of texts featuring Jewish characters in relation to the Holocaust. She narrows down the vast canon to books that are often taught as well as those representative of the themes that encompass this literature. These include...