Holocaust Fiction and the Question of Impiety

Holocaust Fiction and the Question of Impiety PDF Author: David John Dickson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031123948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book discusses the issues underlying contemporary Holocaust fiction. Using Gillian Rose’s theory of Holocaust piety, it argues that, rather than enhancing our understanding of the Holocaust, contemporary fiction has instead become overly focused on gratuitous representations of bodies in pain. The book begins by discussing the locations and imagery which have come to define our understanding of the Holocaust, before then highlighting how this gradual simplification has led to an increasing sense of emotional distance from the historical past. Holocaust fiction, the book argues, attempts to close this emotional and temporal distance by creating an emotional connection to bodies in pain. Using different concepts relating to embodied experience – from Sonia Kruks’ notion of feeling-with to Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory – the book analyses several key examples of Holocaust literature and film to establish whether fiction still possesses the capacity to approach the Holocaust impiously.

Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature

Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Joost Krijnen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004316078
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Holocaust is often said to be unrepresentable. Yet since the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers have been returning to this history again and again, insisting on engaging with it in highly playful, comic, and “impious” ways. Focusing on the fiction of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander, this book suggests that this literature cannot simply be dismissed as insensitive or improper. It argues that these Jewish American authors engage with the Holocaust in ways that renew and ensure its significance for contemporary generations. These ways, moreover, are intricately connected to efforts of finding new means of expressing Jewish American identity, and of moving beyond the increasingly apparent problems of postmodernism.

New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust

New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust PDF Author: Frédéric Bonnesoeur
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, this peer-reviewed volume provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies.

Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film

Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film PDF Author: Matthew Boswell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230358691
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Surveying irreverent and controversial representations of the Holocaust - from Sylvia Plath and the Sex Pistols to Quentin Tarantino and Holocaust comedy - Matthew Boswell considers how they might play an important role in shaping our understanding of the Nazi genocide and what it means to be human.

My Holocaust

My Holocaust PDF Author: Tova Reich
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061842990
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman's daughter and Maurice's granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda. Father and son embark on a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which Maurice—now the driving force behind the most powerful Holocaust memorialization institution in America—organizes to soften up a potential major donor, and which Norman takes advantage of to embark on a surrealistic search for his daughter. At the death camp they run into assorted groups and individuals all clamoring for a piece of the Holocaust, including Buddhist New Agers on a retreat, Israeli schoolchildren on a required heritage pilgrimage, a Holocaust artifact hustler, filmmakers, and an astonishing collection of others. All hell breaks loose when Maurice's museum is taken over by a coalition of self-styled victims seeking Holocaust status, bringing together a vivid cast of all-too-human characters, from Holocaust professionals to Holocaust wannabees of every persuasion, in the fevered competition to win the grand prize of owning the Holocaust. An inspiringly courageous and shockingly original tour-de-force, My Holocaust dares to penetrate territory until now considered sacrosanct in its brilliantly provocative and darkly comic exploration of the uses and abuses of memory and the meaning of human suffering.

The Oath

The Oath PDF Author: Elie Wiesel
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307833798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror. For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man’s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another’s reason to go on living. One of Wiesel’s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature PDF Author: Jenni Adams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441118098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. The volume includes a substantial section detailing new and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated bibliography of relevant research material. Featuring original essays by: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer, Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.

The Broken Voice

The Broken Voice PDF Author: Robert Eaglestone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191084204
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
'Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?' asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: 'one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades'. Robert Eaglestone attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will 'remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory'. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Eaglestone identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism, and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. He explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.

The Broken Vase

The Broken Vase PDF Author: Phillip H. McMath
Publisher: Butler Center Books
ISBN: 1935106449
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The Broken Vase is a roman à clef ("novel with a key," or novel based on real life) written by Phillip H. McMath based upon research done by his co-author, Emily Matson Lewis, and in close collaboration with Holocaust survivor Penina Krupitsky, who appears in the novel as the fictional Miriam Kellerman. With the help of the World Jewish Organization, Mrs. Krupitsky emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family to the United States and now lives in Arkansas. Born to middle-class parents in July 1924 in North Bukovina, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Miriam Kellerman grows up in an atmosphere of culture and privilege that is interrupted when her country is invaded—first by Stalin in July 1940, then by Hitler in June 1941. Fearing for their lives, Jews like Miriam begin to flee into the Soviet Union to escape the German advance. Separated from her parents, Deborah and Max, and later from her fiancé, Isaac, Miriam finds herself alone and on foot, trudging ever eastward. This novel's compelling narrative chronicles her incredible struggle to stay alive as World War II rages. Mrs. Krupitsky lives in Little Rock with her husband, children, and grandchildren. She remains active in Holocaust remembrance organizations around the world and says that she wants The Broken Vase "to help young people and become an inspiration to them. It will teach them how to build a world of love and not of hatred."

The Auschwitz Escape

The Auschwitz Escape PDF Author: Joel C. Rosenberg
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
ISBN: 1414336241
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Joel C. Rosenberg delivers a spellbinding novel about one of the darkest times in human history.