Trauma and affect in a Holocaust survivor's story: Rosita Fanto's novel Rozalia Alone

The authors draw on a natural experiment to demonstrate that states can reconstruct conflictual interethnic relationships into cooperative relationships in relatively short periods of time. The article examines differences in how the gentile population in each of two neighboring territories in Romania treated its Jewish population during the Holocaust. These territories had been part of tsarist Russia and subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism until 1917. During the interwar period one territory became part of Romania, which continued anti-Semitic policies, and the other became part of the Soviet Union, which pursued an inclusive nationality policy, fighting against inherited anti-Semitism and working to integrate its Jews. Both territories were then reunited under Romanian administration during World War II, when Romania began to destroy its Jewish population. The authors demonstrate that, despite a uniform Romanian state presence during the Holocaust that encouraged gentiles to victimize Jews, the civilian population in the area that had been part of the Soviet Union was less likely to harm and more likely to aid Jews as compared with the region that had been part of Romania. Their evidence suggests that the state construction of interethnic relationships can become internalized by civilians and outlive the life of the state itself.

Reviewed by: The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union by Diana Dumitru Ion Popa The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. By Diana Dumitru. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300 pages. $31.99 (paper). Diana Dumitru’s book offers provocative insight and indirect answers to some of the most important questions posed by the millennial problem of antisemitism: what is antisemitism; can it be resisted in a meaningful and successful way; and, how can one explain that antisemitism differs in intensity across the European continent? This highly original study looks at two regions that share important similarities and differences. Although Bessarabia and Transnistria have been central to writings about the Holocaust in Romania (see the work of Jean Ancel, Avigdor Shachan, Dalia Offer, Dennis Deletant, Radu Ioanid, and others), we have not had a comparative study of antisemitic attitudes in these regions until now. The book starts with details about the levels of antisemitism in both Bessarabia and Transnistria before the First World War. These territories had been under Tsarist rule (Bessarabia was annexed to Russia in 1812) for almost the entire nineteenth century. Diana Dumitru contrasts examples of Russian antisemitism—such as those expressed by the central administration and by cultural figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol—with examples from [End Page 190] Bessarabian and Transnistrean writers and journalists. She also examines intellectual circles that fought against the state-supported anti semitic campaign, including the creators of the 1890 “Declaration of V. S. Solov’ev,” signed by Leo Tolstoy among others, that protested the regime’s oppression of Jews. This first chapter draws arguments from a variety of places, from numerous archival materials to a multitude of secondary sources, in languages as varied as French, Russian, English, and Romanian. Later in the book the author uses the extensive archival collections of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the state archives of Romania, Moldova, and Russia. Especially noteworthy is the use of numerous testimonies from both Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories, some of them gathered by the author herself. At the end of the First World War, Bessarabia became part of Romania, while Transnistria became part of the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). The territory of Transnistria is very different today than it was during the Second World War— the book focuses on the war-time territory, which was approximately the size of today’s state of Moldova in southeastern Ukraine. In Romania, the interwar period was a time of increased nationalism and antisemitism, while the Soviet Union was pushing for the concept of korenizatsiia—or indigenization—geared toward promoting “national equality” and “friendship of the peoples.” Diana Dumitru’s book asks whether this difference in state policy and public discourse explains the later differences in behavior toward Jews in the two regions. In the following chapters the evolution of Jewish-Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria is examined. First, the author describes the way in which Bessarabian Jews were treated in Greater Romania, where there was a combination of state-encouraged anti-Jewish policies on the one hand and grassroots continuation of pre-WWI antisemitism on the other. In fact, grassroots antisemitism became even stronger in Romania after 1918 in a context in which the state, which was mostly governed by ethnic Romanians, favored a centralized model alienating the ethnic and religious minorities [End Page 191] added as a result of the Great Union. This was coupled with the intense intellectual debates that legitimized Orthodox Christianity as the core element of Romanian nationalism and encouraged the antisemitic actions of rightwing parties and movements such as the Iron Guard and the National Christian Defense League (often called Cuziști, after the name of its founder A. C. Cuza). The book then moves to Transnistria, where the story was substantially different. The newly established communist regime intended to end centuries of discrimination and conflict between various ethnic groups by integrating them into a new socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party. This intention was visible immediately in...

This study addresses the role of Fritz Schellhorn, the German consul in Cernăuţi (Czernowitz), Romania before and during World War II. Recently Schellhorn has been presented as a rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust. Based largely on Schellhorn’s papers in the German Foreign Office Archives, some have argued that it was not, as previously believed, the wartime mayor and Righteous Among the Nations Traian Popovici, but Schellhorn, who prevented the deportation of 20,000 of Cernăuţi’s Jews by the Romanians during World War II. The following suggests that Schellhorn occupied a more ambivalent position. First, it argues that his actions should be considered in light of power and interethnic relations in the region. Second, it shows that Schellhorn’s legacy includes a decades-long struggle to obstruct the compensation of many Romanian Holocaust survivors by West Germany. Emphasizing Romania’s sole responsibility for the crimes, Schellhorn engaged in a range of postwar interactions—sometimes public, sometimes hostile—with Jewish survivors he had helped and others he had not. The article thus examines Schellhorn’s wartime and postwar activities anew. For one thing, it places these against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Romania’s particular dynamics and contested aftermath. But beyond this, it contributes to the debate over the static labels used to categorize people’s behaviors during the Holocaust and thereby explores the wider and complex links between history, memory, and reckoning.

In this book, Ioanid explores in great detail the physical destruction of Romania’s Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iaşi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Based on thousands of archival documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania’s prefascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. With this book, the Romanian Holocaust will no longer be forgotten.

In this book, Ioanid explores in great detail the physical destruction of Romania’s Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iasi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Based on thousands of archival documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania’s prefascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. With this book, the Romanian Holocaust will no longer be forgotten.

Synthesizing the way in which the Romanian Holocaust has been represented in testimonial literature and films, this article deals with notions such as Holocaust trivialization and denial, as well as with “mastering the Romanian past” of the interwar period and WW2. The article is a cartography of the representations of the Romanian Holocaust; to that end, it follows the chronology of published literary works (documentary texts, memoirs and fiction) and documentary and artistic films which were produced about the Romanian Holocaust in Romania and outside Romania from 1945 to the present.

Synthesizing the way in which the Romanian Holocaust has been represented in testimonial literature and films, this article deals with notions such as Holocaust trivialization and denial, as well as with “mastering the Romanian past” of the interwar period and WW2. The article is a cartography of the representations of the Romanian Holocaust; to that end, it follows the chronology of post-1945 published literary works (documentary texts, memoirs and fiction) and documentary and artistic films which were produced about the Romanian Holocaust in Romania and outside Romania.

The current study is the first to examine the experience of Holocaust Child Survivors (HCSs) sharing their survival stories by performing with youths on one stage as part of the “Testimony Theater” project. Using qualitative data analysis, the findings indicate that the Holocaust experience is an essential element in forming the identity of HCSs. Arriving in the land of Israel, Holocaust survivors had a collective identity of “Holocaust Survivors” that left them with feelings of shame and inferiority, which hindered the establishment of their self-identity. However, when HCSs take the role of the teller through the “Testimony Theater” project, a transition from a collective identity to a self-identity occurs. This role enables HCSs to reconstruct their self-identity and find in it a positive, personal, and meaningful role. Consequently, we suggest that reconstruction of self-identity can occur when survivors take on a positive and empowering role, in the presence of others, within the context of an attentive, empathic, and nonjudgmental relationship.

ABSTRACTWhile saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.

The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians, and of Romanian Jews can be understood only through knowledge of the peculiarities of the Holocaust in Romania within the wider context of Holocaust Studies. Certain characteristic features of the history of the modernization of Romania in the twentieth century turned the “Jewish problem” into an ideologically active element, present on a large scale in the public sphere. Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Romanian Jewry was bound up with the European context, but it also had its own manifestations because of the political regime in Romania from 1938 to 1944. Six decades ago, Lucretiu Pătrăşcanu accurately remarked that “anti-Semitism in Romania still remains a Romanian phenomenon, which should be examined in its specific nature, and not only in what it imitates” (1944, 171). Romanians never embraced this research project; instead, they explained the Romanian Holocaust by blaming it on imported Fascism. One of the most frequently invoked reasons for this neglect is the ideology of national Communism; in this view, everything Romanian was good, while the origin of evil was always from outside. According to this preconception, risen to the rank of a “theory” of history, atrocities either did not occur in Romania from 1938 to 1944 or, if they happened, were caused by external forces.

Significant Hearing Loss Found in Ukrainian Refugees

IT IS NOW ALMOST FIFTEEN YEARS since Cathy Caruth, trained at Yale University in comparative literature, published her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), in which she put forward views on trauma that have been so persuasive to many that they have pretty much come to stand for trauma theory as such. It is more than ten years since I published my book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), in which I criticized Caruth' s views. Since that time, trauma theory has proven to be very resilient, remarkably so in the eyes of those, like myself, who think that Caruth' s ideas are mistaken. But in the last few years trauma theory has also undergone something of a mutation, by which I mean that it has been revised in order to emerge as 'affect theory'. As many readers will be aware, one of the liveliest topics in the humanities and social sciences these days is 'affect' (or even more straightforwardly 'emotion' or 'feeling'), and trauma theory has been influenced by this turn of events. In my essay I plan to sketch this development. I also plan to explain what I think are the stakes involved in the rise of affect theory and to say why I believe that, like the trauma theory that it is in the process of absorbing and superseding, it is fundamentally erroneous. In the course of my discussion I will comment on the aesthetic implications of these developments.Let me start by briefly reviewing what I consider the most essential aspects of Caruth' s trauma theory.1 Like Shoshana Felman and others responsible for the rise of trauma theory in the USA, Caruth proposes a deconstructive account of trauma. But unlike most theorists, who regularly invoke themes of trauma, forgetting, and identity without reference to the large contemporary psychiatric literature on trauma, she incorporates the neurobiology of trauma into her work. In accordance with the views of the American Psychiatric Association and its definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder , Caruth holds that massive trauma precludes all representation because the ordinary mechanisms of consciousness and memory are temporarily destroyed. Instead, she suggests, there occurs undistorted, and - her key term - 'literal' registration of the traumatic event that, dissociated from normal mental processes of cognition, cannot be known or represented but, engraved in brain and body, manifests itself belatedly in the form of traumatic nightmares and other repetitive phenomena. In Caruth' s deconstructive version of neurobiological accounts of trauma, the gap in consciousness and representation that is held to characterize the individual traumatic experience comes to stand for the materiality of the signifier in the sense given the concept by the critic Paul de Man, who theorized a moment of materiality that, on the one hand, belongs to language but, on the other, is aporetically severed from the (speech) act of signification or meaning. At the heart of Caruth' s approach to psychic trauma is thus a 'performative' theory of language according to which a 'death-like' break in or resistance to meaning inheres in language itself. For Caruth, analogous 'death-like' break lies at the heart of trauma: the victim of trauma who cannot symbolize or represent the traumatic accident or event that caused her condition nevertheless obsessively 'performs' or re-experiences it in the form of flashbacks, dreams, and related symptoms. Literary theory and empiricism, in the form of appeal to the findings of science, are thus strangely but, in my view, coherently linked in Caruth' s work. The psychiatric notion of the 'flashback', defined as an [...] that [...] cannot be thought simply as a representation, is regarded by her as the equivalent of the interruption of a representational mode that she associates with de Man's deconstruction of language.2An important aspect of Caruth' s approach to trauma is her suggestion that if language nevertheless succeeds in testifying to the traumatic horror, it does so only when the referential function of words begins to break down, with the result that, as Walter Benn Michaels has put it, what is transmitted is not the normalizing knowledge of the horror but the horror itself. …

My contribution to this special issue investigates how Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath’s 1993 novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (“Jossel Wassermann’s Homecoming”) adopts a narrative practice of voicing Yiddish-speaking Holocaust victims in a post-Holocaust context for the purpose of imagining fictional alternatives to the historical violence inflicted upon them. Using a narrative strategy that I term the “almost-lost” story, Hilsenrath creates a narrative universe in which Yiddish voices, if not the actual Yiddish speakers, can be collected and saved as “anti-data” by disembodied “Quasselstimmen” (German for “chatty voices”). Coupled with strategic narrative interruptions that surface through iterations of narrative disfigurement, Hilsenrath gives rise to narrative possibilities for Jewish resistance within the scope of a literary text. I demonstrate how attentive readers can identify through Hilsenrath’s highly complex narrative a signature for reconsidering the confluence of imaginative fiction and Holocaust history, emphasizing the reader’s ethical dilemma in encountering this history, while also considering how fiction can point us in new directions as we endeavor to pry open and better understand the full scope of atrocities committed against humanity in search for a renewed commitment to humanity and justice in the aftermath of genocidal violence.

This introduction to the volume Narratives of Resilience/Narrative der Resilienz begins with a brief discussion of the term ‘resilience’ as a travelling concept across a range of research fields, evaluating both its critique and its promise, especially for the environmental humanities. It proceeds to consider how resilience research might be expanded through literary and cultural studies and how these can develop concepts of cultural resilience and literary resilience in dialogue with other disciplines. In the definition of “narratives of resilience”, which is the main concern of this introduction, both a transdisciplinary and a specifically literary concept of narrative are taken into account. In contrast to disaster narratives and risk narratives, resilience narratives, seen as a transhistorical phenomenon, focus on the vulnerability experienced by individuals and societies and, even more so, on the strenuous process of their successful or failing resilience. That leads to reflections on the role of narrative practices in both disclosing and, potentially, building resilience, based on the conviction that resilience can be developed through and in the act of sharing stories of catastrophic events and survival. The introduction concludes with a systematic overview of the research questions, concerns, and approaches in this volume’s chapters. The latter examine various narrative strategies in resilience narratives and discuss a broad spectrum of interpretations and facets of resilience between resistance, regeneration, adaptation, and transformation.

In this short essay, I want to address the relationship between positivity and negativity in affect theories and literary analysis by focusing on the connection between empathy and literature in early modernity, a period when affect theories emerge robustly and are articulated in treatises such as De anima et vita (1538) by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1590) or Nueva Filosofía (1587) by Oliva de Sabuco (1562–1626?). We begin with the proposition that fictional narratives may move us to care for others and help them. Indeed, the idea that fiction can make us more empathetic and, thus, turn us into better human beings is a powerful hypothesis that has been the subject of a great number of discussions and publications. However, as we continue to investigate whether and how fiction may lead to prosocial behaviour via empathic responses and what are the narrative strategies that authors may employ to elicit empathy in readers, we need to acknowledge that: (1) the connection between empathy and prosocial behaviour, known as the empathy–altruism hypothesis, is still a controversial one and more empirical evidence is needed to back it up; and (2) there is no direct correspondence between empathic authorial intention and audience reception, a phenomenon that can be discussed through notions such as failed empathy or empathic inaccuracy.