The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture

by Victoria Aarons (Editor), Phyllis Lassner (Editor)

Overview

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030334277
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/25/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	840
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Victoria Aarons is O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, USA. She is the author or editor of 11 books, including The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2015); The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (2016); Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2016); Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (co-authored with Alan Berger) (2017), The New Jewish American Literary Studies (2019), and Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (2019).

Phyllis Lassner is Professor Emerita in The Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and The Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, USA. Her publications include British Women Writers of World War II (1998), Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire, and Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust (1998). She co-edited the volumes Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture (2008) and Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller (2010). Her most recent book is Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film (2017).

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Approaching the Holocaust in the 21^st Century

Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner

Part I Memoir

2 Elie Wiesel’s Quarrel with God

Alan L. Berger

3 Primo Levi’s Last Lesson: A Reading of The Drowned and the Saved

Anthony C. Wexler

4 What We Learn, At Last: Recounting Sexuality in Women’s Deferred Autobiographies and Testimonies

Sara R. Horowitz

Part II Fiction

5 Ghetto in Flames: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Early Postwar Jewish Fiction Avinoam Patt

6 The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, the Holocaust, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and See Under: Love

Naomi Sokoloff

7 When Facts Become Figures: Figurative Dynamics in Youth Holocaust Literature

Joanna Krongold

8 Jewish Boys on the Run: The Revision of Boyhood in Holocaust Fiction and Film

Phyllis Lassner

9 “I sometimes thought I was listening to myself”: Identity-Deliberation after the Holocaust in Chaim Grade’s “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner”

Megan V. Reynolds

10 “The Relatedness of the Unrelatable”: The Holocaust as Trope in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

Paule Lévy

11 The Holocaust in Works by Two Yiddish Writers in Argentina: Simja Sneh and Israel Aszendorf

Alan Astro

12 Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels: Der Nazi & der Friseur and Berlin… Endstation

Till Kinzel

13 Transit and Transfer: Between Germany and Israel in the Granddaughters’ Generation

Ashley Passmore

14 Holocaust Memories and Polish Catholic Identity: Cultural Transmutations of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Rachel F. Brenner

15 Post-Soviet Migrant Memory of the Holocaust

Karolina Krasuska

16 Vasily Grossman and Anatoly Rybakov: Soviet Sources of Historical Memory of the Holocaust

Alexis Pogorelskin

17 Refractions of Holocaust Memory in Stanisław Lem’s Science Fiction

Richard Middleton-Kaplan

Part III Poetry

18 Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Commentary: Responses to the Holocaust in Russian Verse

Marat Grinberg

19 “At Last to a Condition of Dignity”: Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust Poetry

David Caplan

20 Wound Marks in the Air and the Shadows Within: A Poetic Examination of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs

Shellie McCullough

21 The Dark Side of Holocaust Era Poetry: Nazi Poetry Promoting Antisemitism and Genocide

Cary Nelson

Part IV Film and Drama

22 Holocaust Drama Imagined and Re-Imagined: The Case of Charlotte Delbo’s

Who Will Carry the Word?

Holli Levitsky

23 Wresting Memory as We Wrestle with Holocaust Representation: Reading László Neme’s Son of Saul

Gila Safran Naveh

24 Troubled Aesthetics: Jewish Bodies in Post-Holocaust Film

Jessica Lang

25 Screen Memories: Trauma, Repetition, and Survival in Sidney Lumet’s The

Pawnbroker

Sandor Goodhart

26 Haunted Dreams: The Legacy of the Holocaust in And Europe Will Be Stunned

Melissa Weininger

Part V Graphic Culture

27 “Master Race”: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Victoria Aarons

28 The Challenges of Translating Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Martín Urdiales-Shaw

29 We Are a Long Way Past Maus: Responsible and Irresponsible Holocaust Representations in Graphic Comics and Sitcom Cartoons

Jeffrey Scott Demsky

30 Claustrophobic in the Gaps of Others: Affective Investments from the Queer Margins

Golan Moskowitz

31 Recrafting the Past: Graphic Novels, the Third Generation and Twenty-First Century Representations of the Holocaust

Claire Gorrara

32 X-Men at Auschwitz? Superheroes, Nazis, and the Holocaust

Edward B. Westermann

33 An Iconic Image through the Lens of Ka-tzetnik: The Murder of the Mother and the Essence of Auschwitz

David Patterson

34 Photographing Survival: Survivor Photographs of, and at, Auschwitz

Tim Cole

Part VI Historical & Cultural Narratives

35 A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and its Representation in Holocaust Texts

Elizabeth R. Baer 

36 The Place of Holocaust Survivor Videotestimony: Navigating the Landmarks of First-Person Audio-Visual Representation

Oren Baruch Stier

37 Beckett’s Holocaust

Ira Nadel

38 The Auschwitz Women’s Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration

Sarah Cushman

39 Aryan Feminity: Identity in the Third Reich

Wendy Adele-Marie

40 Reconsidering Jewish Rage after the Holocaust

Margarete Myers Feinstein

41 Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: Shoes, Matter, Memory

Sharon B. Oster

42 From Holocaust Studies to Trauma Studies and Back Again

Hilene Flanzbaum

Contributors’ Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This excellent collection of essays, edited by two internationally celebrated scholars, will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the twenty-first-century legacies of Holocaust representation, as they appear in genres ranging from testimony, video-testimony and poetry to graphic novels, comics and photography. It revisits classic works and debates as well as introducing important new perspectives such as those of trauma studies, gender and sexuality, animal studies and the third generation. This Handbook sets the conceptual scene for literary and cultural Holocaust studies in the current era.”

—Sue Vice, Professor of English, The University of Sheffield, UK

"Comprehensive, profound, intellectually daring, Aarons, Lassner and the scholars they have assembled in this remarkable collection have begun a conversation about the representation of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century that will define the terms of that conversation.”

—Joseph Skibell, author of A Blessing on the Moon (1997) and A Curable Romantic (2010)

Editorial Reviews

Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner expertly demonstrate in their comprehensive and thought-provoking Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, this is even truer when the event is the Holocaust, the texts are literary and cultural, and those reassembling them today are already the third generation born since the event. … Along with the accolades for this remarkable handbook, one can only hope that such a volume will be written in the not-too-distant future.” (Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, April 29, 2022)

“The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture will no doubt become an invaluable contribution to future Holocaust research. … This collection is a fine example of interdisciplinarity that will support learning and reference for researchers of all interests and abilities. The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture will prove itself to be a vital asset to any learner, expressing the sheer potentiality of the field to resonate with an abundance of cultural discussions.” (Kieran J. H. Shackleton, Textual Practice, January 13, 2021)

From the Publisher