While scholars have offered independent readings of Philip Roth’s and Saul Bellow’s provocative representations of the Holocaust camp, I put Roth’s and other writers’ (Anthony Hecht’s, Carl Friedman’s, and Nathan Englander’s) handling of this topos in tension with Bellow in their search of ways to approach traumatic history. Without taking sides, I contend that the crisis in representation brought on by the age of genocide comes into focus more vividly through the defamiliarizing trope of the Holocaust camp as seen in more recent fiction than in Bellow’s more poetic, alienating novel.