Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination Marlene E. Heinemann Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination, by S. Lillian Kremer. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 278 pp. $45.00. Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination by S. Lillian Kremer has two major objectives: first, to convince the reader of the equal value of reading Holocaust fiction by women writers as compared to male-written fiction, and second, to claim for novels an equal validity to memoirs and diaries as sources of information on what the Holocaust was like. That women writers of the Holocaust are neglected by many critics and readers has been articulated since at least the 1980s in a small but growing number of articles and books, and there has also been a preference for testimony over imaginative literature in Holocaust studies. This is, I believe, the first book-length critical study of American women writers of Holocaust fiction. Some of these writers are survivors and thus European-born. The writers and narratives analyzed are Ilona Karmel’s Stephania and An Estate of Memory, Elzbieta Ettinger’s Kindergarten and Quicksand, Hana Demetz’s The House on Prague Street (all by survivors); Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Anya, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl and Rosa, Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Norma Rosen’s Touching Evil and several short stories (all American-born non-survivors). Professor Kremer shows that “Holocaust narratives by women writers significantly extend literary representation and interpretation of the Shoah.” She does this partly by showing gender-based forms of suffering and responses to suffering in narratives by women. Karmel, Schaeffer, and Piercy include female bonding and substitute families for psychological support and sharing of food in the camps in their novels. Evidence for the existence of such bonding in testimony by women survivors is cited. Professor Kremer finds that women writers emphasize these themes much more than male writers. Another theme which she highlights in the novels is that of the mother-daughter relationship in the Holocaust, which is sometimes a story of separation and reunion. This is developed in six of the writers’ works. Pregnancies of Jewish women usually meant a death sentence in camps, and babies in camps and ghettos often had to be killed to save the mothers’ lives. The early targeting of Jewish children meant that parents often had the difficult choice between sending their children away to be hidden with Aryan strangers or trying to keep their children with them to share their uncertain fate together. In Karmel’s An Estate of Memory, four female forced labor camp inmates succeed in smuggling a baby out of the camp and into freedom, thus saving mother and child from immediate death. In Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, a female camp inmate witnesses a guard killing her toddler child by throwing it at an electrified fence. In Rosa, the trauma from this event keeps her from adapting well as a survivor after the war, as she fantasizes that her daughter is alive and receives the letters which she writes to her. In several novels, older daughters write about their mothers who heroically sustain them [End Page 177] until the mothers are selected for death. Anya by Schaeffer deals with the mother- daughter relationship across three generations of one family. S. Lillian Kremer also finds the theme of sexual assault and exploitation developed in Holocaust novels by women more than in those by men. Of the writers studied, she highlights Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Anya as treating this theme with the greatest dramatic power, showing the mauling and humiliation of women prisoners being inducted into a forced labor camp. Women’s Holocaust Writing makes a strong case for the credibility of Holocaust fiction even when the authors did not directly experience the Holocaust themselves, which is true of Schaeffer, Ozick, Piercy, and Rosen. The novels are analyzed in their historical context, with reference to relevant testimony by survivors, psychiatric litera ture, and historical documentation. This context tends to support the factual truth of the fiction. Some attention is paid to formal analysis, highlighting structural elements that convey Holocaust reality with greater impact than what is found in...