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Holocaust Literature

Steiner, Liliane . 2023. “The Bo/ald Woman in Auschwitz: From Abjection to Writing”. Partial Answers 21(2): 303-320. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/899745. Publisher's Version
Life Writing Holocaust Literature Women Writers
Abstract

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).

Chen, Junsong . 2021. “Jewish Settlement in Shanghai during WWII in Fiction and Other Media of Cultural Memory”. Partial Answers 19(1): 171-188. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/779889/. Publisher's Version
Literature and Historiography Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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From 1938 to 1945, Shanghai was a temporary haven to more than 20,000 Jews originally from Europe. Most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai survived to see the end of WWII. However, the Jewish settlement in Shanghai during WWII remains a little-known chapter of the history of the Holocaust. Recent decades have witnessed significant changes in this regard. In addition to historical studies, memoirs, and popular culture, the Shanghai experience of European Jews also found its way into literary fiction. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and media studies and based on readings of two novels—Marion Cuba’s Shanghai Legacy (2005) and Beila’s The Cursed Piano (2007, English edition 2017), this article argues that literary fiction contributes, albeit belatedly, to the collective efforts to preserve this important legacy, and may do so in a more compelling way than other media, through special perspectives, engaging storytelling, and broader accessibility.

 

October 2020: Junsong Chen is Associate Professor at the Department of English, East China Normal University. His areas of research include contemporary American literature, cultural memory studies, narratology, and comparative literature. Junsong Chen received his Ph.D. from Shanghai International Studies University (2010), and completed his postdoctoral research at Fudan University (2015-2018). He was a Fulbright visiting research scholar at Harvard University (2018-2019). Over the past decade, his work has been engaged primarily with issues concerning the interaction among literature, history, and politics. He is the author of Political Engagement in Contemporary American Historiographic Metafiction (2013), Cultural Memory of Post-War America in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (forthcoming), and the translator of Chinese editions of Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories and Samuel Beckett’s Proust. His papers have appeared in such journals as Foreign Literature, Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, etc. Currently he is working on a book examining contemporary American literature through the lens of cultural memory, tentatively titled Reconstructing Postwar America: History, Literature, and the Politics of Memory.

Hawthorn, Jeremy . 2019. “History, Fiction, and the Holocaust: Narrative Perspective and Ethical Responsibility”. 17(2): 279-298. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726396. Publisher's Version
Life Writing Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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This article argues that fictional accounts of the Holocaust that include historical characters and events face special ethical challenges. In particular, the presentation of the inner lives of characters representing real people (such as their private thoughts and emotions, their inner speech) is seen to be especially problematic, especially in the case of victims. The article focuses on three fictional accounts of an actual event that took place in the Auschwitz death camp: the shooting of an SS officer named Josef Schillinger by a female prisoner awaiting gassing. These accounts are “The Death of Schillinger” by Tadeusz Borowski (first published in Polish 1959 and in English translation in 1967, but written shortly after Borowski’s release from Auschwitz in 1945 and before his suicide in 1951), “Revenge of a Dancer” by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (which came out in English translation from the unpublished Polish manuscript in 1985, but was written before 1967 when publication in Poland was denied), and A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova by Arnošt Lustig (published in Czech in 1964 and in English translation in 1973). While Lustig’s novel presents the reader with the female victim’s thoughts and feelings, the two shorter works do not, and the article explores the ethical ramifications of this difference.

 

March 2019: Jeremy Hawthorn is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His book The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Filmwas published by Ohio State University Press in 2014. He has published three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and is presently co-editing a volume in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Conrad's works. The fourth edition of his A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory was published in 2000, and the seventh edition of his textbook Studying the Novel by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017.

Ionescu, Arleen . 2019. “The “Differend” of Shoes: Van Gogh, Beckett, Wiesel, Levi, and Holocaust Museums”. 17(2): 255-277. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726395. Publisher's Version
Intermediality Literature and Philosophy Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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Focusing on the representation or presence of shoes in several literary texts and war memorials as metonymies of the Holocaust, this article will rely on Jean-François Lyotard’s call for (impossible yet necessary) linkages “after Auschwitz” to make connections between these various textual and museological scenes. As a point of departure, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s notion of “restitution” in his critique of the debate between Martin Heidegger and art critic Meyer Schapiro on the origin of a pair of shoes in van Gogh’s eponymous painting. While being sensitive to Derrida’s economic argument in The Truth in Painting, I attempt to make a case for the necessity of rehabilitating “restitution” in works of representation and commemoration, across literature, visual arts, memorials and museums.

 

May 2019: Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of 20th-century fiction, especially Modernist prose, as well as Critical Theory, Holocaust Studies, Translation Studies and, increasingly, Memory and Trauma Studies. She has published widely on James Joyce and other related aspects of modernism, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, Parallax, Partial Answers, and Scientia Traductionis. She is co-general editor for Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (Peter Lang, 2014) and The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently working on a book (co-edited with Maria Margaroni) entitled Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield in 2020).

Hakarmi, Batnadiv . 2009. “Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and the Midrash”. Partial Answers 7(1): 31-43. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/257884. Publisher's Version
Volume 7, issue 1 Topoi Holocaust Literature
Abstract

The essay explores Primo Levi's description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi's memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

 

Liu, Sarah . 2009. “The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz”. Partial Answers 7(2): 319-342. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/267010. Publisher's Version
Volume 7, issue 2 Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, as well as of Charlotte Delbo’s, Jean Améry’s, and Primo Levi’s memoirs, Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well, John Felstiner’s translation of Celan’s Todesfuge, and Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.

 

June 2009: Sarah Liu received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral fellowship from UC Davis. She has taught courses on Modernism in Theory and Practice, twentieth century American and British literature, and the Holocaust in text and film. Recipient of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Nonfiction (2007), she also teaches creative writing. Currently a Research Scholar in Jewish and Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is at work on a book titled Hybrid Resonance: Restructuring Reading and Representation after Auschwitz, a study of disruptions to the hermeneutic circle in the literature of atrocity and possible  models for renewal.

 

Codde, Philippe . 2007. “"Burned by the history of the twentieth century": Trauma and Narrative Containment in Daniel Stern's Holocaust Novels”. Partial Answers 5(1): 51-75. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/214102. Publisher's Version
Volume 5, issue 1 Narrative as a Way of Thinking Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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In memory of Daniel Stern (Jan. 18, 1928 -- Jan. 24, 2007)

This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern’s two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels.

 

January 2007: Philippe Codde teaches in the English department of Ghent University, Belgium. He has published on various topics (especially Jewish American literature, French literary and philosophical existentialism, trauma theory, and polysystem theory) in journals including Poetics Today, Yiddish (Modern Jewish Studies), Studies in American Fiction, English Language Notes, Saul Bellow Journal, Thomas Hardy Yearbook, and Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature, as well as in volumes such as Lost on the Map of the World: Jewish-American Women’s Quest for Home in Essays and Memoirs, ed. Phillipa Kafka, and Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, ed. Emmanuel Nelson (Greenwood, 2005; entries on Richard M. Elman, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Edward Lewis Wallant). His book The Jewish American Novel will be published by Purdue University Press in 2007.

 

Harrison, Bernard . 2006. “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction”. Partial Answers 4(1): 79-106. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244585. Publisher's Version
Volume 4, issue 1 Literature and Philosophy Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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The philosopher Berel Lang offers powerful arguments for the conclusion that there can be no useful fictional treatment of the Holocaust. However, he notes that three writers (Celan, Appelfeld, and Borowski) escape the force of these arguments. Lang is prepared to grant that, in such cases, “literary and moral genius” may enable a writer to “transcend” the “supposedly intrinsic” limitations suggested by abstract philosophical argument; but leaves open the question what such “genius” consists in. This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to that question for the specific case of Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld’s fictions introduce their readers into the fabric of Jewish life in Central Europe immediately prior to the catastrophe, to the extent of allowing them to feel in propria persona, and thus to attain knowledge-of, rather than merely knowledge-about, the tensions constituting the situational framework within which those lives were lived. Appelfeld’s fictions offer a way of recovering the individuality, as persons rather than numbers, of those whom the Shoah destroyed, because individuality displays itself, inter alia, in the varying of individual response to a common situation. Such recovery is relevant to our moral understanding of the Shoah, it is argued, because what is morally important about the representations of the Shoah is not merely the destruction, but also the nature of what was destroyed. The essay concludes with brief discussions of the relative merits, in this connection, of fiction and memoir, and of the criticisms levelled against Appelfeld’s work by M. A. Bernstein and others.

 

Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Updated in March 2017

 

Kohn, Irena . 2006. “The Book of Laughter and 'Unforgetting': Countersigning the Sperre of September 1942 in The Legend of the Lodz Ghetto Children”. Partial Answers 4(1): 41-78. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244584. Publisher's Version
Volume 4, issue 1 Topoi Holocaust Literature
Abstract

Written in Polish in the form of a long poem accompanied by 17 illustrations, The Legend of the Prince was created in Leon Glazer’s tailor workshop in the Lodz Ghetto, and was found in the ghetto’s ruins after the war by a survivor, Abraham Wolf Yasni. Designed in the form of an album for presentation to the Ghetto’s Elder, Chaim Rumkowski, the legend is told from the perspective of those having the good fortune to work in Glazer’s tailor ressort.  However, within the bright illustrations and rhyming, metred verse that carries the legend from start to finish is buried the tragic story of the September 1942 Sperre.  This essay argues that the story that is offered in the spirit of a light-hearted and diverting fairy tale and tribute, fictionalizing the trials and tribulations of the children working in Glazer’s workshop, is in fact a sophisticated memorial act, registering for its creators the trauma of the mass deportations of children, the sick and the elderly which took place over eight days of mandatory curfew in the Ghetto.
        Following a pattern of visual and narrative instabilities in the album's self-presentation, I attend to moments in which The Legend points not only to the events in Lodz Ghetto of which it must not speak but also to familiar works of children's literature, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which contribute to the "logics" by which the album might be read.

 

January 2006: Irena Kohn is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.  Her dissertation on testamentary documents from the Lodz Ghetto that appear in less "familiar" historical forms (such as fiction, poetry, art work, music) considers the ways in which these traces of the past might ask us to engage differently with the historical memory of the Shoah.

 

Ginsburg, Ruth . 2006. “Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives”. Partial Answers 4(2): 205-218. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244990. Publisher's Version
Volume 4, issue 2 Narrative as a Way of Thinking Holocaust Literature
Abstract

The category of narrative space, which was side-stepped by classical narratology and narrative theory in general, has recently become a center of interest for a growing number of literary scholars. Using Bakhtin’s insights with regard to the “interconnectedness” of spatial and temporal relations in literature, the paper attempts to define a category of a “negative” chronotope which structures trauma narratives, suppressing time and foregrounding space. Ida Fink’s short story “traces” serves as an example for the workings of such a chronotope.

 

Szeintuch, Yehiel . 2005. “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-Tzetnik”. Partial Answers 3(1): 101-132. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/250308. Publisher's Version
Volume 3, issue 1 Topoi Holocaust Literature
Abstract
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Yechiel Fajner (also known as Karl Tsetinski, Yechiel De-Nur, and Ka-Tzetnik 135633),  author of six books on the Holocaust, wrote his first book (Salamandra) in Naples 1945. This article deals with the organic connection between the title “Salamandra” and the content of the novel against the background of the author’s Holocaust experience in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps (Auschwitz and Günthergrube). While considering himself a chronicler of the Holocaust, Ka-Tzetnik created a literary style making use of cultural and literary symbols found in world literature and Jewish literature (from the Talmud to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature). One of his central symbols is rooted in the myth of the Salamander, which in this article is analyzed in detail via a discussion of Ka-Tzetnik’s different sources.

 

January 2005: Professor Yechiel Szeintuch teaches in the Department of Yiddish Language and Literature, Institute for Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main fields of research are Yiddish literature in Poland in the twentieth century, the cultural history of the Jews during the Holocaust; the bilingual (Yiddish and Hebrew) work of Yechiel Fajner (Katzetnik) and Mordechai Strigler; East European Yiddish humor; and the Jewish underworld as reflected in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

 

Clowes, Edith W. . 2005. “Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature”. Partial Answers 3(2): 153-182. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244575. Publisher's Version
Volume 3, issue 1 Literature and Ideology Topoi Holocaust Literature
Abstract

The article deals with literary constructions of memory of the Holocaust as it happened on the territory of the Soviet Union. This article focuses on the slaughter of Kiev’s Jews in the ravine Babii Iar, September 29--October 3, 1941, the horrifying event that has received the most significant treatment in officially permitted Soviet literature. Complicating the problem of confronting the Holocaust on Soviet soil were two contradictory tasks: 1) the authors’ goal of remembering the Nazis’ deliberately anti-Jewish genocide in the context of their also deliberate anti-Slavic and anti-Soviet designs, and 2) the editors’ and censors’ goal of reasserting a specious Soviet ideology of internationalist, egalitarian “humanism” that held that no nationality should get a preferential treatment. Works discussed range from those of the 1940s (Erenburg, Grossman, and Ozerov), through the 1960s (Evtushenko, Kuznetsov), to the 1970s (Rybakov). 

 

June 2005: Edith W. Clowes is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. She is the author of numerous articles and books on German and Russian philosophy and the interactions of philosophy and Russian fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They include: The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890--1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1988; translated into Russian: Nitsshe v Rossii, St. Petersburg, 1999), and Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, 1993). Her most recent book is Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2004).