scholarly journals Dialogical Memory and Immemorial Poetics: The Ethical Imperatives of Holocaust Literature

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Blake W. Remington

Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung”, this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and “Engführung”, I turn to Primo Levi’s “Shema”, a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust.

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew McKie

The events of the Holocaust of European Jews (and others) by the Nazi state between 1939 and 1945 deserve to be remembered and studied by the nursing profession. By approaching literary texts written by Holocaust ‘survivors’ from an interpersonal dimension, a reading of such works can develop an ‘ethic of responsibility’. By focusing on such themes as rationality, duty, witness and the virtues, potential lessons for nurses working with people in a variety of settings can be drawn. Implications for the teaching of nursing ethics are made in the areas of the virtues, relationships, professional ethics and the moral community of nursing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael Berkowitz

This article argues that Albert Friedlander’s edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work’s connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander’s study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.


Paragraph ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-278
Author(s):  
Cathy Caruth

This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of the moment Yehiel Dinoor, a writer also known as K-Zetnik and one of the few eyewitnesses at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, falls out of the stand and into a coma while attempting to provide his testimony. By rethinking this historical trauma as a ‘collapse of witnessing’, I suggest Felman and Laub shift the focus from a purely cognitive or epistemological question — a problem of knowing and not-knowing — to a question of communicating to others: a problem of address. It is the circumstance of having ‘no one to whom one could say Thou’, as Laub puts it (Testimony, 82), that constitutes the Holocaust, for the victims, as what the authors call an ‘event without a witness’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ruta

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.


Author(s):  
Richard S. Esbenshade

THE long-accepted, fairly universal idea of a ‘great silence’ on the Holocaust in general, and in Hungary in particular, extending from the end of the Second World War until the Eichmann trial, has recently been challenged.1 The return or emergence from hiding of survivors quickly led to an explosion of Holocaust literature. Before the communist takeover, in the midst of difficult material and turbulent political conditions, Jenő Lévai and others published collections of documents;...


Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Robinson

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has been notorious since its first publication in 1948, but rarely, if ever, has it been read in light of its immediate historical context. This essay draws on literature, philosophy, and anthropology from the period to argue that Jackson’s story, which scholars have traditionally read through the lens of gender studies, invokes the themes of Holocaust literature. To support this argument, the essay explores imaginative Holocaust literature from the period by David Rousset, whose Holocaust memoir The Other Kingdom appeared in English translation in 1946, anthropological discourse from the period on scapegoating and European anti-Semitism, and critical discourse on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism from the period by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The analysis finds that, in representing the phenomena of scapegoating and death selection in a small town in the US, Jackson’s story belongs to an abstract discourse on Holocaust-related themes and topics that was actively produced at midcentury, as evidenced partly by Rousset’s influential memoir. A master of the horror genre, Jackson could have drawn on her own experience of anti-Semitism, along with her known interest in the study of folklore, to contribute this chilling representation of the personal experience of death selection to a discourse on Holocaust-related themes. As this article shows, the abstract discourse Jackson’s story joined is marked by skepticism about or disinterest in ethnic difference and anthropological concepts. Due to the fact that this article features comparative analysis of Holocaust literature, a sub-topic is the debate among scholars concerning the ethics of literary representation of the Shoah and of analysis of Holocaust memoir. Jackson’s story and its context invoke perennially important questions about identity and representation in discourse about the Shoah and anti-Semitism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Hallvard Kjelen

Artikkelen drøfter eit sentralt problemfelt innom litteraturdidaktikken, nemleg tilhøvet mellom litterær lesing som fagleg kompetanse og litterær lesing som oppleving. Problemfeltet er særleg knytt til Louise Rosenblatts arbeid. Ho viser ved hjelp av omgrepa efferent og estetisk lesing korleis det er ei utfordring for litteraturlæraren å utvikle ei litteraturundervisning som i tilstrekkeleg grad tek omsyn til kjensler og røynsler. I ein litteraturteoretisk kontekst er subjektive responsar på litterære tekstar irrelevante, men i ein litteraturdidaktisk kontekst er subjektive responsar høgst relevante. Denne artikkelen bidrar inn i diskusjon-en mellom anna ved å trekkje inn meir empirisk basert litteraturteori som referanseramme. Artikkelen presenterer tre lesarars litterære responsar, og viser korleis kunnskap om individuelle lesarresponsar kan vere utgangspunkt for ei litteraturundervisning som balanserer ei fagleg tilnærming til litteratur opp mot ei meir opplevingsbasert tilnærming.Emneord: Litteraturundervisning, litterær kompetanse, empirisk litteraturteori, lesarresponsAbstractThe article discusses a key issue in literature didactics, namely the relation between literary reading as an academic competence, and literary reading as an experience. The discussion draws heavily on Louise Rosenblatt’s work. By using the concepts efferent and aesthetic reading, she shows how it is a challenge for the teacher of literature to develop literature teaching that adequately takes emotions and experience into account. In a literature-theoretical context, subjective responses to literary texts are irrelevant; but in a didactics context, the subjective responses are highly relevant.  This article contributes to the discussion by bringing in a more empirically based literature theory as a frame of reference. The article presents three readers’ literary responses, and shows how knowledge of individual reader responses can be the basis for literature teaching which balances an academic approach to literature with a more experience-based approach.Key word: Teaching literature, literary competence, empirical literary theory, reader-response 


2020 ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Кринка [Krinka] Видаковић-Петров [Vidaković-Petrov]

Transgenerational Memory: From Pre-Holocaust to Post-YugoslaviaThe study focuses on Fanika as an example of documentary writing by firstand second-generation survivors, i.e. women in the mother-daughter relationship (Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučić and Branka Jovičić), both from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The timeline of the life story of Hanna/Fanika, born in 1922 in a Sephardic family from Sarajevo, coincides on the macro level with the history of Yugoslavia (the establishment of the state and the interwar period, World War Two and the Holocaust, the postwar socialist period, the break-up of the country and post-Yugoslavia), which is important for the contextualization of the narrative. We have analyzed the motivation of first-generation survivor Fanika Lučić to present her memories of the Holocaust, highlighting the importance of communicative memory as an instrument of their transmission to a second-generation survivor as well as the process involved in their transfer from private to public narrative. Further analysis refers to the generic frames of the narrative, its hybrid character, and its liminal position at a point where biography and autobiography meet and interact. Mediation is a key procedure in Fanika, so attention has been dedicated to determining the degrees of mediation, their variation throughout the narrative and their impact on the substructures (narrative segments). Finally, we have identified, interpreted, and contextualized several gender markers appearing at various levels of the text. In conclusion, the book was designed not only to transmit the Holocaust testimony of Fanika Lučić, but also to provide a biographical account of her life in socialist Yugoslavia, her experience of the war in Bosnia, and the final phase of her life as a Canadian immigrant. Transgenerational memory and gender play a key role in the hybrid structure of this book, which is a welcome contribution to Yugoslav Holocaust literature. Pamięć międzypokoleniowa: od czasów przed Holokaustem do okresu postjugosłowiańskiegoArtykuł analizuje książkę Fanika jako przykład prozy dokumentalnej, autorstwa dwóch kobiet należących kolejno do pierwszego i drugiego pokolenia ocalałych z Holokaustu. Są to pochodzące z Sarajewa matka i córka – Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučic i Branka Jovičic. Ramy czasowe historii życia Hanny/Faniki (ur. 1922 w sefardyjskiej rodzinie) zbiegają się z historią Jugosławii (powstanie państwa i okres międzywojenny, II wojna światowa i Holokaust, powojenny socjalistyczny okres, rozpad kraju i okres postjugosłowiański), co stanowi istotny punkt wyjścia dla kontekstualizacji narracji. W artykule poddano analizie zarówno motywację ocalałej z pierwszego pokolenia Faniki Lučić do przedstawienia swoich wspomnień z Holokaustu, podkreślając znaczenie pamięci komunikacyjnej jako narzędzia służącego do przekazywania wspomnień ocalałemu z drugiego pokolenia, jak i proces transferu wspomnień z narracji prywatnej do publicznej. Dalsza analiza odnosi się do ogólnych ram narracji, jej hybrydowego charakteru i jej pozycji liminalnej w punkcie, w którym biografia i autobiografia spotykają się i współdziałają. Ponieważ mediacja jest procedurą kluczową w Fanice, zwrócono uwagę na określenie stopnia mediacji, jej zmienności poprzez narrację, a także jej wpływu na narracyjne podstruktury (segmenty narracyjne). Wreszcie zidentyfikowano, zinterpretowano i osadzono w kontekście kilka wyznaczników płci pojawiających się na różnych poziomach tekstu. Podsumowując, książka miała na celu nie tylko przekazanie świadectwa o Holokauście Faniki Lučić, ale także przedstawienie biograficznego opisu jej życia w socjalistycznej Jugosławii, jej doświadczeń wojny w Bośni i ostatniej fazy jej życia jako imigrantki w Kanadzie. Pamięć międzypokoleniowa i płeć odgrywają kluczową rolę w hybrydowej strukturze tej książki, która wnosi istotny wkład do jugosłowiańskiej literatury Holokaustu.


2020 ◽  
pp. 409-425
Author(s):  
Tatiana Czerska

The article presents findings contained in the work by Arkadiusz Morawiec entitled Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa. Rekonesans [Polish literature faced with genocide. Reconnaissance]. The scholar from Łódź calls into question the hitherto established hierarchy of genocides. Extensive comparative research into literary representations of particular wartime massacres is what constitutes the thematic pivot of the said treatise, which joins in the discussion scope outlined by genocide studies. Subsequent chapters of the presented book are devoted to literary reverberations of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Turks, the Nazi-Germany extermination of persons with physical and mental retardation as well as Sinti and Roma, the Srebrenica massacres carried out by Serbs. The remaining chapters deal with the Holocaust literature and, according to the author’s intentions, an attempt to enrich the state of research, and sometimes – to amend some of their findings.


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