Holocaust Fiction Research Articles

Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction

The problem many find, with literary fiction about the Holocaust, is that it is fiction. The thought which governs our discomfort with the idea of Holocaust fiction is primarily a moral one; but one with epistemic implications lurking in its depths. We feel ourselves under a duty to those who suffered, to confront as best we can the unvarnished facts of their suffering, and to refrain, above all things, from embroidering them, falsifying them, with any admixture of our own concerns. Here, more than anywhere else, we feel, we stand in need of forms of writing which can stand, to borrow Aharon Appelfeld's phrase in the epigraphic passage above, as authentic expressions of reality. And imaginative fiction, we imply, fails that test is not, whatever other virtues it may possess, an authentic expression of reality. I was first led into the line of thought developed here by a chapter in Berel Lang's brilliant and searching enquiry into the intellectual roots of the Holocaust, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In Chapter 6 of that work, Lang deploys a rather impressive version of the

The Holocaust and the postmodern

This book argues that postmodernism, especially in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is a deeply engaged response to the Holocaust. In turn, this thought illuminates a number of issues in our understanding of the Holocaust. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Reading and the Holocaust, concentrates on testimony and literature, and argues that testimony is a new and singular genre with its own generic characteristics. It clarifies issues of memory and literature and analyses and defines post-1990 Holocaust fiction. The second part, Holocaust Histories, argues that there are two different understandings of truth at work in the discipline of history, and that the history of the Holocaust brings this to the fore: later chapters explore this by looking at the work of one leading Holocaust historian, Saul Friedländer, the limits of historical explanation, and at Holocaust denial. The third part, The Trace of the Holocaust, turns to philosophy and argues in detail that the work of Levinas is a response to the Holocaust and evaluates its success. Chapter 10 evaluates Derrida's thought as post-Holocaust philosophy and focuses on the idea of the trace. Chapter 11 looks at philosophical attempts to explain Nazism and reveals the limits of philosophical discourse. The final chapter turns to the idea of the human and looks at ways in which the human has been thought after the Holocaust. The conclusion turns to issues to which this overall discussion might lead.

Experience and Expectations: The Dialogic Narrative of Adolescent Holocaust Literature

In My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust, Adrienne Kertzer communicates a need the development of a dialogic Holocaust narrative that embodies the dualistic purpose of adolescent Holocaust literature, a narrative that simultaneously respects our need hope and happy endings even as it teaches us a different lesson about history (75). In the study of adolescent Holocaust literature, this discussion both reiterates a traditional response—that of the need for hope and happy endings—and, more importantly, calls the development of an innovative Holocaust narrative. For the more traditional response, one may look to such an early text as Eric Kimmel's Confronting the Ovens: Holocaust and Juvenile Fiction (1977), where he outlines an existing typology of Holocaust works, arguing that this typology metaphori- cally forms a series of Dantean rings circling hell. Kimmel defines the four rings/tropes of juvenile Holocaust literature as: 1) Resistance novel, 2) Refugee novel, 3) Occupation novel, 4) Jewish resistance novel, also defined as the heroic (85-9). Whereas each ring attempts to initiate read- ers into the ineffability of the Holocaust through introducing the frightening social, political, and cultural issues that arose from this event, Kimmel does concede that the texts within the differing rings either avoid raising discussion concerning the confusing circumstances that led to the Final Solution or fail to initiate readers into the darker horrors of the concentration camp experi- ence. As such, Kimmel is aware that the avoidance of the concentration camp novel may be a problem the development of adolescent Holocaust fiction, Michael J. Martin is an Assistant Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he teaches courses in Contemporary American Literature, Young Adult Literature, and pedagogy. His most recent work, The Ethics of After: Melvin Jules Bukiet, Holocaust Fiction, and the Reemergence of an Ethical Sense in the Post-Holocaust World, appeared in a special issue of Shofar. He has also published work in Review of Contemporary Fiction. His research interests include Jewish-American literature, literary theory, and historical trauma as evidenced in Young Adult Literature. Currently, he is at work on a more developed interrogation of the movement beyond Postmodernist fiction in American Literature and culture.

The Ethics of After: Melvin Jules Bukiet, Holocaust Fiction, and the Reemergence of an Ethical Sense in the Post-Holocaust World

The greater purpose in "The Ethics of After: Melvin Jules Bukiet, Holocaust Fiction, and the Reemergence of an Ethical Sense in the Post-Holocaust World" is to interconnect Melvin Jules Bukiet's current fictional and theoretical discussions with those of late postmodern theory. In doing so, this piece forges a connection between theory and Holocaust literature in an effort to highlight an emerging discussion within Holocaust literature that asks the reader to move beyond the ineffability of the event and work towards a new understanding of what can be gained from Holocaust study in a 21st-century culture. Particularly, the new understanding to be gained is that of an ethical sense that is developing within the fictional and theoretical writings of current crackpot realists.

The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction

In three recent books by young Jewish American writers, Nathan Englander's For the Release of Unbearable Urges (1999), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002), and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), each author uses fantasy to represent the Holocaust or to thematize the problem of its representation. In these writers' hands, fantasy can point to the difficulty of directly accessing historical experience, it can be a medium for representing Jewish folk culture before the Holocaust, and it can even provide pleasure and escape through its diversions. In Englander's story "The Tumblers," the famous Fools of Chelm are transplanted into a Nazi environment and miraculously survive. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer uses magical realist devices to give shape to his imaginary shtetl, Trachimbrod. Chabon's Kavalier & Clay is exceptional in presenting fantasy as a means of therapeutic escape from history. Chabon most directly confronts the problem of representation through non-realist techniques, and strikingly, he sets up a defense of popular escapism as a quintessentially American artistic response to the Holocaust.

Holocaust Controversies in the 1990s: The Revenge of History or the History of Revenge?

During the 1990s it was often remarked that controversies about the persecution and mass murderof the Jews between 1933 and 1945 had acquired an unprecedented volume and vehemence. Indeed, the esca...

Sue Vice: Holocaust Fiction.

Sue Vice: Holocaust Fiction.

Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments

In the context of Holocaust literature, there has been much recent discussion regarding the boundaries between fact and It has been recognized that Holocaust fiction is often based on extensive historical research and documentation, while Holocaust testimony is subject to the inaccuracies and distortions of memory. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler 's List , argued that his novel, based on interviews with survivors and extensive archival research, comprised a hybrid form, suspended between fact and fiction, which he termed non-fiction fiction. Art Spiegelman's Maus comic books, based on historical research and interviews with his father, took thirteen years to complete. Spiegelman protested when the New York Times classified Maus under Fiction in its best

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

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...

A Knock at the Door: Reading Judith Kerr's Picture Books in the Context of Her Holocaust Fiction

A Knock at the Door: Reading Judith Kerr's Picture Books in the Context of Her Holocaust Fiction

Liberal Anti-Judaism and the Victims of Modernity

William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979) has long been a subject of adverse criticism within Holocaust studies, and it was initially generated by Cynthia Ozick's prepublication polemic against Styron, Liberal's Auschwitz (1975), in the spring edition of the aptly entitled journal Confrontation. Ozick's delegitimation of and his novel was, in turn, exhaustively taken up by Alvin H. Rosenfeld in an essay for Midstream, Holocaust According to William Styron (1979), and was developed further in Rosenfeld's A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (1980) and Imagining Hitler (1985). As this argument has been recently contested in Sue Vice's Holocaust Fiction (2000), I heartily recommend a reading of Vice's chapter on next to Jews Without Memory and its earlier incarnations. Professor D. G. Myers adds little to these decades-old attacks on and ignores virtually all of the critical material on Sophie's Choice in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be found in Holocaust Fiction. Nor does he add anything of substance to the manifold deliberations on Jewish uniqueness and the Holocaust which have been usefully summarized by Michael Marrus in The Holocaust in History (1988) and by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Professor Paul Breines is right to concentrate on the underlying assumptions that underpin Myers's essay and I will follow his lead in this regard. At the same time, I believe that it is essential to move beyond the identity politics-whether neoconservative (Myers) or liberal assimilationist (Breines)-which have unfortunately set the terms of their exchange. The key point is not to replace one version of American-Jewish identity with another, as Breines has done, but to shift the debate away from the futile question of identity While I disagree wholeheartedly with Myers (there is barely a sentence of his essay which I would not wish to challenge), he has certainly raised some important issues: namely the question of Liberal

Breaking the Silences: Jewish-American Women Writing the Holocaust

Abstract This article focuses on a detailed reading of three short stories from the 1980s (Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl', Rebecca Goldstein's 'The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish', and Leslea Newman's 'A Letter to Harvey Milk'), and argues that the recent profusion of short fiction by American-Jewish women, much of it dealing with the Holocaust, represents a breaking of two silences: the taboo imposed on American-Jewish women writers by the canonical dominance of male figures such as Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, and the absence in their fiction of the Holocaust. It suggests that there is in these short stories an ambivalent aesthetic of Holocaust fiction at work: that is to say, a desire to give a voice to wartime Jewish suffering, and the fear that to do so will inevitably involve aestheticizing, and therefore profaning, that suffering. This manifests itself in these stories in an unresolved tension between speech and silence. Literature is often a matter of response to the challenge of the literature that went before. Work by women swings not only on this pendulum, as most writing does; it swings on a second pendulum, within the first. Women reply to what is expected of them as women -- complying if they are compliant, rebelling if they are not. (Norma Rosen).[1] The greatest paradox forms about the Holocaust, it seems to me, for novelists, in the tension between writing and not writing about it. If the writer treats the subject, the risk is that it may be falsified, trivialized. Even a 'successful' treatment of the subject risks an aestheticizing or a false ordering of it, since whatever is expressed in art conveys the impression that it, too, is subject to the laws of composition. Yet not to write means omitting the central event of the twentieth century. (Norma Rosen)[2] One of the most striking developments in post-war American fiction has been the emergence of a number of male Jewish-American novelists as mainstream, even canonical figures. In the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud all have entries; among contemporary American-Jewish women only Grace Paley rates a mention. The gender imbalance is even greater in Tony Hilfer's Longman Guide to post-1940 American fiction in which Bellow, Roth, Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller are all given individual consideration, whereas Cynthia Ozick's is the lone female Jewish entry. When Martin Amis observes, 'The twentieth-century novel belongs to [. . .] Jewish-Americans',[3] it is these male writers he is referring to, rather than their female counterparts: Anzia Yezierska, Hortense Calisher, Tillie Olsen, Ozick, and Paley. Leaving aside his personal enthusiasm, amounting almost to discipleship, for the work of Bellow, and the question of whether his aesthetic values are underpinned by peculiarly male sensibilities, there is undeniably a generic, if not a gender, bias operating here. Although he has himself written a collection of short stories, for Amis (and indeed for most of the still predominantly male academic establishment) it is the novel that is the index of greatness in fiction. This immediately loads the dice against women fiction writers, who have often been, and still are, drawn to the short story form.[4] When it comes to Jewish-American women writers, certainly, the three most influential figures, Ozick, Paley, and Olsen, are all best known for their work in this genre. Moreover, in the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion of writing, most of it in the form of short stories, by American-Jewish women.[5] If it was once possible to speak of Jewish-American fiction and mean male Jewish-American fiction, it should be so no longer. While Bellow and Mailer are still writing and Philip Roth continues to go from strength to strength, many of the old guard (Singer, Malamud, Heller, Stanley Elkin) are now dead, and among the younger generation it is women writers (most of whom have made their names writing short stories) who are leading the way. …

Holocaust fiction

Holocaust fiction

Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust FictionHorowitzSara R. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and CultureState University of New York PressAlbany, 1997, 276, $17.95

Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust FictionHorowitzSara R. <i>Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction</i> SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and CultureState University of New York PressAlbany, 1997, 276, $17.95

Voicing the void: muteness and memory in Holocaust fiction

Voicing the void: muteness and memory in Holocaust fiction

Israeli Holocaust Fiction: A Review of Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and Amos Oz's Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Israeli Holocaust Fiction: A Review of Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and Amos Oz's Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Jurek Becker's Holocaust Fiction: A Father and Son Survive

Jurek Becker's Holocaust Fiction: A Father and Son Survive

Writing and the Holocaust

In this extraordinary collection of essays, historians, novelists and philosophers ponder the imponderable: Was the effort to exterminate the Jewish people a unique historic event or does it fit into a larger context? Is there justification for creating Holocaust fiction? Is humour an appropriate tool in Holocaust literature? Must a work about the Holocaust have redemptive value? With some exceptions, the essays were presented as papers at a 1987 conference at SUNY Albany. Among the participants were Saul Friedlander, Raul Hilberg and Aharon Appelfeld. Although a few contributions are oppressively intellectual, many brilliantly interweave anecdotes and issues to arrive at insights into the awesome task of writing about the Holocaust. Appelfeld, for example, vividly recollects pitiful child survivors who performed snatches of Jewish songs for coins before concluding, The problem...has been to remove the Holocaust from its enormous, inhuman dimensions and bring it close to human beings.