scholarly journals “Nature’s Revolt”: The River’s Reply in Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Bridget Menard
Keyword(s):  
Human Suffering ◽  
Rhine River ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

This article accounts for what language and memory are and are not capable of in literary depictions of the Holocaust. To read, analyze, or even write Holocaust narratives, readers must expect to encounter new forms of writing and expression. This interpretation of Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time effectively inverts the paradox of ‘telling’ the unspeakable by giving voice to an aspect of life that cannot communicate in clear and ordinary ways. In Fink’s fiction, nature speaks. The Gniezna River in “A Spring Morning”, a nameless river in “Titina”, and the Rhine River in “Night of the Surrender”, all brim with associations and themes concerning connections between language, time, meaning, God, nature, and human suffering during the Holocaust. They have unspeakable things to say, refusing to remain silent in response to human atrocity.

Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
North African ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
French National Identity ◽  
Holocaust Narratives ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”

scholarly journals To Traumatize or to Put under a Taboo? Holocaust Narratives in Children’s Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 251-264
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Rybak
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Young Reader ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

The article investigates the ways of representing the Holocaust in children’s literature published in Poland in the 21st century (e.g. Joanna Rudniańska’s Kotka Brygidy and Smoke by Antón Fortes and Joanna Concejo). Phenomena such as anti-Semitism or death of the main character, called by researchers and critics inappropriate for a young audience, are analyzed with the use of the research on taboo in children’s literature (Bogusława Sochańska and Justyna Czechowska) as well as confronted with the threat of “traumatization” of the young reader (Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek). The analysis proves that the Shoah only appears to be well-represented in children’s literature as many topics are still omitted.

Suicide as Testimony

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-106
Author(s):  
Sarah Waters
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Quality Work ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Universal Spaces ◽  
A Site

Chapter two examines suicide letters as a mode of testimony that bears witness to extreme suffering in the contemporary workplace. In an economic order that conceals the labour relationships that bring services and products to us, suicides push human suffering to the surface and force it out into the open. Drawing on testimony studies, I situate suicide letters at a juncture between the everyday and the extreme that unsettles the boundaries between the two and forces us to confront extremity in the everyday. Whilst these letters give expression to exceptional trauma, they are located within the quotidian, routine and functional spaces of work. Some recent critics have depicted the contemporary workplace as a site of extremity, drawing on the historical metaphor of the Holocaust to describe forms of managerial brutality and violence. Contrary to these representations, I suggest that the workplace is best understood in terms of its everydayness. This is a space governed by order, discipline and routine, where working life is subject to endless repetition and reiteration. Yet, this everydayness has a unique quality: work suicides make visible extreme suffering, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but one that is embedded within the universal spaces of social life.

Heidegger, The Holocaust and Postmodernism

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-84
Author(s):  
Peter Schotten ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Ethical Standard ◽  
High Price ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Ethical Concept ◽  
The Holocaust

Martin Heidegger, an influential twentieth-century philosopher, attempted to transcend previous metaphysical understandings. Rejecting his Catholic heritage, his ontology sought to free itself from any objective ethical standard Nonetheless, he was unable to reject ethical matters entirely. Before Hitler's rise to power, Heidegger championed authenticity as a quasi-ethical concept. Later, he condemned technology as the source of human suffering. Neither led him to condemn the Holocaust explicitly. Such a condemnation was warranted in light of Heidegger's enthusiastic early support of National Socialism and his silence at its collapse. Ultimately, Heidegger's silence reflected the unacceptably high price of amoral thought intent upon celebrating only itself Heidegger's conception of the human being in a world where transcendental standards do not exist reveals the spirit of postmodern man, rooted in nothing larger than himself.

Suffering “Has a Smooth Shape, Smooth as a Black Night. There Are No Handles.”

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
Rosemary Williams
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Practice ◽  
The Holocaust

The quid-pro-quo stance to human suffering is prominent in psychological practice, in everyday life, and in attitudes to survivors of the Holocaust. In this view, suffering is the consequence of unrighteousness. Old Testament Wisdom literature as a whole is non-determinative about the cause of suffering, but much theology and christology still remains determinative, to the harm of suffering human beings.

scholarly journals “Abandoned Secrets”. The Question of the Holocaust Narratives in Ukrainian Literature

2017 ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Anja Golebiowski
Keyword(s):  
Mass Murder ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Orange Revolution ◽  
Critical Phase ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

The reportage Ukraine without Jews (1943) by the Soviet writer Vasilij Grossman is one of the earliest public reports on the Holocaust. Although Ukraine had been in the centre of the Nazi mass murder and single voices like the ones of Grossman or Il’ja Ėrenburg even called betimes attention to the ongoing genocide of Ukrainian Jews, any tradition of Ukrainian Holocaust narratives has not been developed yet. Since its independency in 1991, there are attempts to participate in the Western memory discourse, but by now, they have rather no broader impact. The reception of the debate on the Holocaust serves more likely as a backdrop for its own discourse of victimization, the Holodomor, which is used for developing a national identification within the current Ukrainian nation-building process. Since the Orange Revolution, as the Ukraine has found itself in a critical phase of a socio-political upheaval, some texts of leading Ukrainian writers (Marija Matios, Oksana Zabužko, Jurij Vynnyčuk) have occurred that carefully raise the subject of the Holocaust, or rather the gap in the Ukrainian consciousness. This paper gives an overview about the texts and works out the narrative strategies, whereby only the coming years will show, if these texts constitute the beginning of a Ukrainian Holocaust literature.

scholarly journals Hungarian Women’s Holocaust Life Writing in the Context of the Nation’s Divided Social Memory, 1944-2014

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Louise O. Vasvári
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Intergenerational Transmission ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Mothers And Daughters ◽  
Child Survivors ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

In this paper, in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary year of 1944 in Hungary, I explore selected women’s Holocaust diaries, memoirs, letters, and other less studied documents, such as recipe books, all written during the war, which can provide invaluable resources for understanding the experiences of the victims of war, by personalizing the events and helping to write the obscure into history. At the same time, such documents allow historical voices of the period to provide testimony in the context of the divided social memory of the Holocaust in Hungary today.  I will first discuss several Hungarian diaries and “immediate memoirs” written right after liberation, among others, that of Éva Heyman who began writing her diary in 1944 on her thirteenth birthday and wrote until two days before her deportation to Auschwitz, where she perished. I will then discuss two recently published volumes, the Szakácskönyv a túlélélésért (2013), which contains the collected recipes that five Hungarian women wrote in a concentration camp in Austria, along with an oral history of the life of Hedwig Weiss, who redacted the collection. Finally, I will refer to the postmemory anthology, Lányok és anyák. Elmeséletlen történetek [‘Mothers and Daughters: Untold Stories’] (2013), where thirty five Hungarian women, some themselves child survivors, others daughters of survivors, write Holocaust narratives in which their mothers’ lives become the intersubject in their own autobiographies, underscoring the risks of intergenerational transmission, where traumatic memory can be transmitted (or silenced) to be repeated and reenacted, rather than worked through.

scholarly journals Cruising Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial

Anos 90 ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (42) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rozas Krause
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art Exhibition ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Holocaust Narratives ◽  
Jewish Museum

Profile pictures from gay dating sites of young men posing with the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin have been subject to an art exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and a tribute online blog. This paper unveils the meaning of these pictures on this particular site, in an effort to understand why these men chose to portray themselves at the Holocaust Memorial in order to cruise the digital sphere of gay dating websites. In three consecutive sections, the paper asserts that, on the one hand, the conversion of the Holocaust Memorial into a cruising scenario is facilitated by a design that —putting forward autonomy and abstraction— allows and even invites its constant resignification in terms of everyday practices. And, on the other hand, it posits that the images exhibited at the Jewish Museum can be interpreted as a performative memorial which reinscribes sexuality and gender into Holocaust narratives. 

Julian Stryjkowski

1998 ◽  
pp. 381-384
Author(s):  
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter presents an obituary for Julian Stryjkowski. Julian Stryjkowski is often referred to as a man who became a writer because of the tragic events of the war. He was the indirect chronicler of the Shoah, and the last guardian of the vast Jewish cemetery Poland was turned into during the war. Undoubtedly, the Holocaust gave him a strong and final impetus to record the vanished community in all its richness, but he had already started writing before the war. It is hard to say, however, what turns his career would have taken if not for the Holocaust. The main themes in Stryjkowski's writing are human suffering and tragic existence, troublesome friendships, frustrated loves, the influence of history upon the human condition, and most of all the problem of identity.

scholarly journals Whose Memory is it Anyway? An Exploration of Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Physically Handicapped ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

During the Holocaust, Hitler and his Nazi Party were responsible for the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews, as well as the callous slaughter of additional minority groups such as Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the physically handicapped, mentally ill and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nevertheless, in Western consciousness, the Holocaust has essentially become synonymous with Jewish history and destruction. As a result, the non-Jewish victim experience has been effectively diminished in popular culture. This MRP draws on literature in cultural memory studies and survivor testimonies available on YouTube to analyze the power struggle between non-Jewish minority groups that were persecuted in the Holocaust and their Jewish counterparts to understand why the former appears excluded from mainstream Holocaust narratives. The goal: to emphasize that the Holocaust was not merely a Jewish tragedy, but a profound calamity for humankind.

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