Citation:
Date Published:
7 June 2023Abstract:
In their memoirs female Holocaust survivors recount the systematic misogynic attack of the female body in Auschwitz. The various literary figures that render, or rather testify to, a scene that is in every way repugnant to humanity in its violence, and the emphasis on the brutal physical aggression inflicted on women in Auschwitz underscore the resulting epistemological malaise.
From the memoirs of Eva Edith Eger (The Choice), Livia Bitton-Jackson (I Have Lived a Thousand Years), Rena Kornreich Gellisen (Rena's Promise), and Erna Rubinstein (The Survivor in Us All), there emerges a collective portrait of the subversive Jewish woman who resists the heavy weight of the Nazi power. Through a close reading of female Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, this essay shows how the brutal assault on gender gave birth – against all odds – to a new Jewish woman who not only overcomes the shock of being despoiled of her basic cultural and gender assets but uses this deprivation to rise above her condition and eventually to write her own self through what Helene Cixous calls “a language of revolution.”
March 2023: Steiner Liliane, Ph.D. Summa cum laude from Bar-Ilan University, is Senior Lecturer in Hemdat Hadarom College of Education. She specializes in comparative literature, gender studies, Holocaust studies, children's literature, philosophy, languages. She is the author of The Interaction between the Sexes, the Post-abjection of the Archaic Mother (Resling, 2014) and Between Breastfeeding and Exams (Mofet, 2019), both in Hebrew. Also in Hebrew she has published three children’s books: Hila's Choice (Sefer Lakol, 1995), Bittersweet Chocolate (Contento, 2014), and The Two Overseers of the Synagogue (Gefen, 2017).