Post-Holocaust Fiction Research Articles

Jewish Brazilian Post-Holocaust Fiction: The Body as a Source of Polymorphous Memory Discourse in Cíntia Moscovich’s Por que sou gorda, mamãe?

Abstract In this article, I propose a reading of the Brazilian novel Por que sou gorda, mamãe? (2006) through the prism of the body as an oblique signifier of polymorphous post-Holocaust memory discourse. I will be employing the idea of the “strange body” in the following, that is, an experience of estrangement that can arise from trauma-induced conflict or fracture and “is capable of testifying to complexes of social operations and realities well beyond not only a given subject, but also a given generation” (Atkinson 2017, 34). In Cíntia Mos­covich’s novel, this strange-bodiness is articulated through the uncanny presence of an obese Jewish female body; a body which bears witness to a subversive force of trauma and denounces the fascist ideology within the continuities of subtly intertwined European and Brazilian histories. European Jewish life in shtetlech, pogroms, exile, and the Holocaust merge not only with the Brazilian context of Jewish immigration, but also with the history of Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Everybody’s Holocaust? Tova Reich’s Satirical Approach to Shoah Business and the Cult of Victimhood

This paper sets out to demonstrate the changes that post-Holocaust fiction has been undergoing since around the turn of the new millennium. It analyzes the highly innovative and often provocative approaches to the Holocaust and its memory found in Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust—a scathing satire on the personal and institutional exploitation of Holocaust commemoration, manifested in the commodification of the historical trauma in what has been termed “Shoah business”. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the Holocaust by popular culture. This paper focuses on Reich’s critical response to the cult of victimhood and the unhealthy competition for Holocaust primacy, corresponding with the growth of a “victim culture”. It also explores other thematic aspects of the author’s satire—the abuse of the term “Holocaust” for personal, political and ideological purposes; attempts to capitalize on the suffering of millions of victims; the trivialization of this tragedy; conflicts between particularists and universalists in their attitude to the Shoah; and criticism of Holocaust-centered Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to show how Tova Reich has enriched post-Holocaust fiction by presenting a comic treatment of false victimary discourse, embodied by a fraudulent survivor and a whole gallery of inauthentic characters. This paper highlights the novel’s originality, which enables it to step outside the frame of traditional Holocaust fiction.

‘You think your writing belongs to you?’: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature

This article examines a sub-category of recent Jewish post-Holocaust fiction that engages with the absent memory of the persecution its authors did not personally witness through the medium of intertextuality, but with intertextual recourse not to testimonial writing but to literature only unwittingly or retrospectively shadowed by the Holocaust. It will be proposed that this practice of intertextuality constitutes a response to the post-Holocaust Jewish author’s ‘anxiety of influence’ that, in the wake of the first generation’s experience of atrocity, their own life story and literature will always appear derivative. With reference to works by four such post-Holocaust authors, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (2013), Helen Maryles Shankman’s In the Land of Armadillos (2016), and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017), all of which engage intertextually with Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, it will be suggested that these authors are looking to return to a Kristevan practice of intertextuality after the predominantly citational recourse to antecedent material that has often characterized post-Holocaust literature. In the process, they also succeed in troubling recently popular conceptualizations of ‘postmemory’ literature as the ‘belated’ and ‘evacuated’ recipient of encrypted traumatic content inherited from the first generation that it must now seek either to preserve or to work through vicariously.

The Politics of Escapistry: Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Politics of Escapistry:Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Iain Bernhoft (bio) Late in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Joe Kavalier returns home from years of self-imposed exile with 102 boxes of old comics in tow. Having endured the Holocaust, warfare, and addiction, Joe loves these comics for the escape they offer: when he is immersed in their pages, the ever-present "pain of his loss … melted away without him even noticing" (576). "[S]uch a feat of escape," the narrator declares, is "the genuine magic of art," and the fact that escapism "remain[s] so universally despised" indicates only how "fucked-up and broken" the real world is. In Kavalier & Clay, Chabon aims to correct this injustice by illuminating the therapeutic value of escapist entertainments. A defense of entertainment features prominently throughout Chabon's writing, as he consistently puts popular genres to serious purposes [End Page 1] (for instance, detective fiction in The Final Solution, or hardboiled in The Yiddish Policemen's Union).1 The politics and consequences of this escapism, however, merit closer consideration. Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Sammy Klayman, a Jewish teen in Brooklyn, and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who arrives in New York as a refugee from Hitler-occupied Europe. Pairing Joe's drawing skills with Sammy's knack for yarns and entrepreneurial spirit, they find success in creating comic books about a Superman-style magician, titled (after its hero) The Escapist. The novel follows the cousins through their personal and professional maturation as they navigate the mass-culture industry, World War II, family, midlife crisis, and the McCarthy years. When Joe abandons his life in New York to join the war, the closeted Sammy marries Joe's pregnant lover Rosa and raises Joe's son as his own, preserving (with Rosa) a dwindling role in the comic book industry. Throughout, Kavalier & Clay underscores the idea that the primary good of imaginative entertainment is escapism, which it serves up in an immersive, harmoniously ordered narrative that reaches a satisfying closure. Criticism on Kavalier & Clay has largely taken for granted its premises concerning the merits of escapism, reading the novel as a vehicle for addressing representational issues of graphic narrative or post-Holocaust fiction. Marc Singer argues that the novel demonstrates how the literalized tropes of comics "have proven effective at embodying the real through hypostasis" because they offer a representative strategy for "transcending the symbolic" (275). Andrzej Gąsiorek views Kavalier & Clay as offering through ekphrasis "a meta-account of the act of creation itself," which thereby self-reflexively speaks to the dilemmas of post-Holocaust fiction (877). In a similar vein, Hillary Chute presents Kavalier & Clay as asking "how one responds to or registers history—especially traumatic history—in a popular medium" (280). She suggests that through graphic narrative it "enumerat[es] the new possibilities of popular forms to confront and articulate history" (291). This favorable disposition toward escapism, manifested by Kavalier & Clay and its critics, points to a larger trend in contemporary literary and cultural discourse: namely, the ongoing elevation of popular entertainment. So-called serious literature increasingly adopts the forms of genre fiction, while fantasy is lauded as a critically valuable activity precisely for its capacity to depart from existing conditions. Distinct from the postmodern blurring of high and low culture, this turn calls into question the superiority of critical distance to affective immersion. Seeking alternatives to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs the "tracing-and-exposure" habit of critical hermeneutics, a [End Page 2] number of scholars have offered accounts of literature's function and relevance beyond critique (124). These approaches—surface reading, affect theory, the new sincerity—aim to "engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading," not the least of which is escape from the limits of quotidian life and the self (Felski 14). As Charles Altieri argues, "many readers see their interest in reading precisely as an opportunity to escape the empirical self, to undergo through imagination protean changes of identity and sympathy" (29). Imaginative escape from the self, the thinking goes, fosters greater empathy, sensitivity, and...

The Bloomsbury companion to Holocaust literature

Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Current research 1. A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust Victoria Aarons 2. Questions of Truth in Holocaust Memory and Testimony Sue Vice 3. After Epic: Adorno's Scream and the Shadows of Lyric David Miller 4. Relationships to Realism in Post-Holocaust Fiction: Conflicted Realism and the Counterfactual Historical Novel Jenni Adams 5. Theory and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation Michael Bernard-Donals 6. 'Don't you know anything?' Childhood and the Holocaust Adrienne Kertzer 7. Holocaust Postmemory: W. G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses 8. Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Edgar Hilsenrath's The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones Erin McGlothlin 9. The Holocaust and the Taboo Matthew Boswell 10. Holocaust Literature: Comparative Approaches Stef Craps 11. Depoliticizing and Repoliticizing Holocaust Memory Richard Crownshaw New Directions in Holocaust Literary Studies Annotated bibliography Glossary of Major Terms and Concepts Index

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy

Book Review| March 01 2015 The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. By Baer, Elizabeth R.. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. 2012. x, 229 pp. Paper, $27.95.Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions. By Redding, Arthur. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press. 2011. xii, 149 pp.$27.50.Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. By Norman, Brian. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 2013. viii, 223 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $29.95.Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. By Fuss, Diana. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2013. x, 150 pp. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $21.95. David Schmid David Schmid Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2015) 87 (1): 200–202. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865307 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Schmid; The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. American Literature 1 March 2015; 87 (1): 200–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865307 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

Reading Games in Auschwitz: Play in Holocaust Youth Literature

Near the end of Jane Yolen's young adult Holocaust novel Briar Rose (1992), a young Polish woman says to an older storyteller, You like to play (229). The statement is not a compliment; it is an accusation, a charge of callous impropriety and blithe indifference toward the sober facts of the Holocaust. Yolen's novel is excavating personal histories from the ruins of the genocide, and play appears to have no role in such inquiries. But the text's American protagonist, whose family history the storyteller has just recounted, swiftly reverses the charge: I think you like to play too, she says with some pique to the young Pole, a friend who helps the heroine unearth her complicated ancestry. The penchant for play in this context may be shameful, but it is something the characters share, a common predilection that neither figure can resist. However, the Polish friend parries the protagonist's reproach. She offers justification for the informed use of play in rehearsing tragic history: If one does not play games, she says, then there is too much to weep about (230). For the chastened individual who plays with sensitivity tinged with historical consciousness, games can be a vital prophylactic against the dolorous tears brought on by too much knowledge of the past. We play so as to avoid cry- ing. In this particular view, the ludic power of play inures one just enough to face the traumatic past without succumbing to a threnody of despair. This passage points to a surprising theme in the corpus of juvenile lit- erature on the Holocaust: many of its texts focus, incongruously, on play. Games and play 1 appear with astonishing frequency in works of fiction the Holocaust for older children and young adolescents. My sample draws on post-Holocaust fiction written for readers aged nine through fourteen, the late elementary school and junior high school grades in which texts the event are frequently taught. Throughout this body of work, games and play serve as the linchpin either for surviving the genocide or for trans-

Baer, Elizabeth R. The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction

Baer, Elizabeth R. The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

Reviewed by: The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer Jenifer S. Cushman Elizabeth R. Baer. The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Press, 2012. Pp. 229. Paper $27.95. ISBN 978-0-8143-3626-7. Responding to Theodor Adorno’s condemnation of poetry after Auschwitz, Elizabeth Baer urges readers to consider “the viability of imaginative works about the Shoah” (2) in The Golem Redux. But Baer’s work is no gauntlet thrown glibly down to Holocaust scholars, rather she traces the figure of the golem from its first mention in the Psalms to sixteenth-century Prague tales surrounding Rabbi Loew, and on to early twentieth-century versions, in order to support her reading of the golem in post-Holocaust works as a “tribute to Jewish imagination and imaginative literature.” (3) The role of the post-Holocaust golem, she asserts, is “to affirm the viability and authority of the imagination, of story, and of creativity.” (12) Baer’s discussions of language and word anchor her focus on intertextuality in later golem works as a vehicle for creativity. In her first chapter dealing with the Jewish tradition of the golem—and as a prelude to her discussion of intertextuality—she highlights both the speechlessness of the traditional golem figure, and the animating Hebrew words emeth (truth) or aemaet (life) that deanimate the golem when a letter is removed, resulting in meth, “death.” Baer’s four subsequent chapters treat, in order, pre-Holocaust non-English appropriations (Meyerink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, and Duvivier’s 1936 film Le Golem: the Legend of Prague), post-Holocaust traditional retellings (Bashevis Singer’s 1969 and 1982 The Golem, Wiesel’s 1983 The Golem, and Sherwood’s 2002 The Book of Splendor), portrayals in comic books and graphic novels (Marvel Comics 1970s Golem issues, Sturm’s 2001 The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Hamill’s 1997 Snow in August, and Chabon’s 2000 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and recent intertextually-rich golem manifestations (Ozick’s 1997 The Puttermesser Papers, Rosenbaum’s 2002 The Golems of Gotham, The X Files’s 1997 “Kaddish” episode and Handler’s 2000 Watch Your Mouth.) Certainly any work devoted to a figure as ubiquitous as the golem cannot claim to be exhaustive, but Baer enhances her work with an annotated bibliography of other golem texts in her epilogue. Throughout her analysis, Baer argues for the golem as the manifestation of the creative urge, both artistically and, as in Sherwood and Ozick, sexually. This particular focus, which culminates in a discussion of post-Holocaust golem tales, establishes her study as something more than a well-researched catalogue of golem-retellings. In her approach to each text, Baer summarizes [End Page 73] the work—including the details of the golem creation ceremony as a parallel to artistic creation—and skillfully addresses important themes that emerge in connection to the Holocaust. Her discussion of the most recent works proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, and she hones in on the significant differences among retellings, situating them in their socio-historical context. Although Baer’s comparison of Singer and Wiesel’s similarities strays into the realm of the irrelevant when she notes, for example, that both “enjoyed visiting Miami” (81), her biographical notes about the authors serve to locate their works in a specific setting. Her analysis thus provides insight into both the development of the figure and the malleability of its meaning, while acknowledging other golem scholars (87) and their contribution to the evolution of the figure. Baer’s treatment of the early twentieth-century German appropriations is particularly interesting in its handling of the nationalism inherent in popular culture surrounding the First World War and the transition to Weimar Germany. The tension between scientific and romantic sensibilities common to late nineteenth-century horror literature fed into apprehensions concerning the dehumanizing technologically-advanced battles of the First World War. On one very general level, early twentieth century literary monsters can be read as critiques of industrialization and science by a conservative central European populace terrified of the modern world. At...

The golem redux: from Prague to post-Holocaust fiction

First mentioned in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, the golem is a character in an astonishing number of post-Holocaust Jewish-American novels and has served as inspiration for such varied figures as Mary Shelley's monster in her novel Frankenstein, a frightening character in the television series The X-Files, and comic book figures such as Superman and the Hulk. In The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, author Elizabeth R. Baer introduces readers to these varied representations of the golem and traces the history of the golem legend across modern pre- and post-Holocaust culture. In five chapters, The Golem Redux examines the different purposes for which the golem has been used in literature and what makes the golem the ultimate text and intertext for modern Jewish writers. Baer begins by introducing several early manifestations of the golem legend, including texts from the third and fourth centuries and from the medieval period; Prague's golem legend, which is attributed to the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew; the history of the Josefov, the Jewish ghetto in Prague, the site of the golem legend; and versions of the legend by Yudl Rosenberg and Chayim Bloch, which informed and influenced modern intertexts. In the chapters that follow, Baer traces the golem first in pre-Holocaust Austrian and German literature and film and later in post-Holocaust American literature and popular culture, arguing that the golem has been deployed very differently in these two contexts. Where prewar German and Austrian contexts used the golem as a signifier of Jewish otherness to underscore growing anti-Semitic cultural feelings, post-Holocaust American texts use the golem to depict the historical tragedy of the Holocaust and to imagine alternatives to it. In this section, Baer explores traditional retellings by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel, the considerable legacy of the golem in comics, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and, finally, Golems to the Rescue in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of film and literature, including those by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, and Daniel Handler. By placing the Holocaust at the center of her discussion, Baer illustrates how the golem works as a self-conscious intertextual character who affirms the value of imagination and story in Jewish tradition. Students and teachers of Jewish literature and cultural history, film studies, and graphic novels will appreciate Baer's pioneering and thought-provoking volume.

"Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word": Carole Maso's Post-Holocaust Narrative

This paper argues that Carole Maso's novel AVA demands to be read not only as an instance of ecriture feminine but also as a piece of post-Holocaust literature. This reading refocuses attention on one of the novel's major themes and helps to rethink the contested category of post-Holocaust fiction itself. AVA demonstrates the profound effect the Holocaust has had on American art since the end of World War II, illustrating the extent to which the terms "postmodern" and "post-Holocaust" have become synonymous. It also contributes to an understanding of contemporary American cultural production as melancholic.

Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction

here is something singularly paradoxical about George Steiner. An avowed elitist, he is also a tireless popularizer whose literary journalism, in both Great Britain and the United States, includes hundreds of uncollected pieces in the New Yorker, TLS, and London Sunday Times.' Steiner, the doyen of ineffability and seeker after Real Presences, beyond the word, never stops speaking or writing. From his essay Postscript (1966) onward he tells us not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable and yet he endlessly invokes that which cannot be articulated. In a recent essay he notes, It is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the Shoah. Unsurprisingly, he has increased periodically his own attempts to formulate, stylize, and codify an intelligible approach to the Holocaust. 2

Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction

Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction