LITERATURE AND THE HOLOCAUST: INVESTIGATING THE VALUE OF A LITERARY HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

The Holocaust is one of the most researched and documented genocides in history, and yet it remains an inconceivable tragedy, for it is challenging to comprehend the mass killings, inhumane conditions, and sheer hatred that the European Jews faced during World War II. Literature has long been used as an educational tool about the realities of life. In contrast to history textbooks, literature allows readers to dive into the psyche of those persecuted; adheres to the historical events, while permitting artistic exploration of personal narratives; and creates a space where the unspeakable experiences and dehumanization during the Holocaust can be spoken, shared, and contended with. The literary reading process entails a dialogue between the reader and the narrative, thus generating an inquiry-based education on the Holocaust. Holocaust literature is sustained by survivors’ stories of resilience. Although these tales of resilience often do not have traditionally happy endings, they depict that people must contend with their past suffering and offer an educational tool to transmit testimony in the hopes of inspiring resilience in others. Holocaust literature provides a platform to meaningfully communicate personal narratives, which demystifies the tragedy as an isolated incident, educates readers on the historical realities of the Holocaust, and places responsibility on everyone to resist indifference. Through exploration of the artistic forms and historical elements of selected works of Holocaust literature, this paper will demonstrate that literature is a valuable tool in educating on the Holocaust and has merit as an integral part of school curricula.

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Holocaust Representation and Graphical Strangeness in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: “Funny Animals,” Constellations, and Traumatic Memory

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Communicatio ◽

10.1515/auscom-2017-0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 61-75

Author(s):

Ana-Maria Gavrilă

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Jewish People ◽

Narrative Structure ◽

Narrative Form ◽

Pulitzer Prize ◽

Traumatic Memory ◽

Holocaust Literature ◽

World War ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Cultural Connotations

Abstract Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, a Pulitzer-prize-winning two-volume graphic novel, zooms into wartime Poland, interweaving young Vladek’s – the author’s father – experiences of World War II and the present day through uncanny visual and verbal representational strategies characteristic of the comics medium. “I’m literally giving a form to my father’s words and narrative”, Spiegelman remarks on MAUS, “and that form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visual structures of the page”. The risky artistic strategies and the “strangeness” of its form, to use Harold Bloom’s term, are essential to how the author represents the horrors of the Holocaust: by means of anthropomorphic caricatures and stereotypes depicting Germans as cats, Jewish people as mice, Poles as pigs, and so on. Readings of MAUS often focus on the cultural connotations in the context of postmodernism and in the Holocaust literature tradition, diminishing the importance of its hybrid narrative form in portraying honest, even devastating events. Using this idea as a point of departure, along with a theoretical approach to traumatic memory and the oppressed survivor’s story, I will cover three main topics: the “bleeding” and re-building of history, in an excruciating obsession to save his father’s – a survivor of Auschwitz – story for posterity and to mend their alienating relationship and inability to relate; the connection between past and present, the traumatic subject, and the vulnerability it assumes in drawing and writing about life during the Holocaust as well as the unusual visual and narrative structure of the text. The key element of my study, as I analyse a range of sections of the book, focuses on the profound and astonishing strangeness of the work itself, which consequently assured MAUS a canonical status in the comics’ tradition.

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Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia

10.1007/978-3-030-84663-3_5 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 119-148

Author(s):

Anna Wylegała

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Exceptional Case ◽

Ethnic Violence ◽

Ethnic Cleansing ◽

World War ◽

Mass Violence ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Personal Experiences ◽

Mass Killings

AbstractThis chapter focuses on the multidimensional trauma of witnesses to mass ethnic violence. The author analyzes the personal experiences of civilians during World War II in Eastern Galicia (once a multi-ethnic borderland region: before 1939 in Poland, now in Ukraine). What makes Galicia an exceptional case study is the continuity of mass violence of different kinds and against different groups of the population: Soviet repression and mass killings, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing of Poles committed by Ukrainian nationalists, and conflict between Soviet authorities and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Drawing on existing concepts from the field of bystanders’ studies, for example, Michael Rothberg’s implicated subject and Omer Bartov’s communal genocide, the author proposes to understand the trauma of Galician bystanders as a complex and multidimensional experience, psychological as well as collective and communal.

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Painted Memories

Gastronomica The Journal of Food and Culture ◽

10.1525/gfc.2007.7.4.26 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 7 (4) ◽

pp. 26-29

Author(s):

mayer kirshenblatt ◽

barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

World War ◽

Daily Diet ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Yom Kippur ◽

Root Vegetables

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.

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“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes ◽

10.25071/1916-0925.40065 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 26 ◽

Author(s):

Emily Robins Sharpe

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

World War Ii ◽

Civil War ◽

Spanish Civil War ◽

World War ◽

Canadian Literature ◽

The Earth ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Subject ◽

War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

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Catastrophic narratives

10.1093/oso/9780199663941.003.0037 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Kahn ◽

Mark Lipovetsky ◽

Irina Reyfman ◽

Stephanie Sandler

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Social Criticism ◽

Russian Literature ◽

Historical Change ◽

First Century ◽

Holocaust Literature ◽

World War ◽

Important Trend ◽

Narrative Forms ◽

Personal Trauma

The chapter considers how, beginning with the Revolution and continuing across the centry, new narrative forms in prose and poetry fashion a discourse of national destiny. As narratives conceptualize historical change and convey the meanings of catastrophe, they develop new plotlines, metaphoric systems and mythological visions. The chapter argues that Russian literature on the Great Terror, collectivization, and Gulag achieves a focus on historical and personal trauma comparable to Holocaust literature. Soviet narratives of World War II also form an important trend from the 1940s through twenty-first century, serving simultaneously as the source of social criticism and the sustained attempt to redefine national identity.

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Fragments of the Holocaust

10.5117/9789462986886 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

David Duindam

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Critical Analysis ◽

Museum Studies ◽

Historical Study ◽

World War ◽

Holocaust Memory ◽

Holocaust Memorial ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

The Holocaust ◽

A Site

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.

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Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

Visual Communication ◽

10.1177/1470357218785931 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 199-229

Author(s):

Ayelet Kohn ◽

Rachel Weissbrod

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Original Work ◽

Second Generation ◽

Holocaust Survivors ◽

World War ◽

Graphic Narrative ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Graphic Narratives ◽

Jewish Resistance ◽

Resistance Movement

This article deals with Kovner’s graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (2015) as a case of remediation and hypermediacy. The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve the transformation of the original work into another medium. While some adaptations strive to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its unique blend of artistic materials adapted from different media. The author, Michael Kovner, uses his paintings to depict the story of Ezekiel – an imaginary figure based on his father, the poet Abba Kovner who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement during World War II. While employing the conventions of comics and graphic narratives, the author also makes use of readymade objects such as maps and photos, simulates the works of famous artists and quotes Abba Kovner’s poems. These are indirect ways of confronting the traumas of Holocaust survivors and ‘the second generation’. Dealing with the Holocaust in comics and graphic narratives (as in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is their use as a means to deal with trauma; what makes this graphic narrative unique is the encounter between the works of the poet and the painter, which combine to create an exceptionally complex work integrating poetry, art and graphic narration.

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