scholarly journals Surviving to Tell the Tale: 'No One is Here Except All of Us'

Linguaculture ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Cristina Chevereșan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Trauma Narratives ◽  
Creation Myths ◽  
Generation Immigrant ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Insight Into

The article focuses on Romanian-American Ramona Ausubel’s 2012 No One Is Here Except All of Us. Written in English by a second-generation immigrant to the United States, the World War II story unfolds dramatically as a fable that relies upon community, memory and imagination. It revolves around the protagonists’ shared belief that by erasing and reinventing their past, by starting their lives anew via reshuffled creation myths, their small assembly of forgotten individuals might survive in an enclave of its own, fantastic. This makes Ausubel’s unique approach to the Holocaust and its pogroms part of a compelling series of trauma narratives, as a biographically-informed fictional account of factual circumstances. By emphasizing the crucial, cathartic dimension of storytelling and employing it textually and meta-textually, the book blurs the boundaries between genres. The author’s mediated insight into community stereotyping, persecution, solidarity and, ultimately, migration, and its skillful integration into a postmodern (counter) fairytale, will be scrutinized as valuable and effective contemporary awareness-raising tools.

Contemporary Fascism’s de-Judified Homo Sacer

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Hong Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture’s use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama’s election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites.

scholarly journals Nathalie Skowronek « a la recherche de Max » : Construction litteraire et autometatextualite dans les ouvrages de la 3e generation de la Shoah

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
José Luis Arráez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Moral Narrative ◽  
Insight Into

The third generation survivors of the World War II genocide of the European Jews withstand, analyse and create literary texts about the Holocaust, a historical event, which was not endured by them directly but experienced through scientific papers and creative literature. Thanks to Nathalie Skowronek, a novelist living in Brussels, and her publication of Max en apparence (2013) and La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (2015), we can gain some insight into the social and literary reality of Jewish genocide memory and into its intergenerational transmission. Firstly, we will carefully analyse the approach used by this author in the composition of a biographical text about her grandfather’s reconstruction of events. After that, using an intertextual approach, we will analyse formal and moral narrative considerations of the authoress which govern the literary reconstruction grandfather’s biography.

"This Is Your Life": Telling a Holocaust Survivor's Life Story on Early American Television

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Shandler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Personal History ◽  
World War ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Television ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract The appearance of Hanna Bloch Kohner on a 1953 episode of the series This Is Your Life is among the earliest presentations of a Holocaust survivor's personal history on American television. Analysis of the program explores how television—a collaborative, corporate medium—shapes the telling of an individual's life story, and how the program relates the story of the Holocaust in terms of personal history. The article also examines how the program's producers employed television's distinctive characteristics to enable, limit, or otherwise shape the presentation of the Holocaust, and how the episode indicates that its creators understood its subject as being somehow singular, even as the conceptualization of the Holocaust was emerging, before the term Holocaust entered American public discourse. The article also considers how the program reflects the social and political context of post-World War II America in general and postwar American Jewish life in particular. Finally, the article considers how analysis of this program offers insight into other, later presentations of the Holocaust on American television, especially those dealing with the life story of an individual survivor. (Yiddish Studies/Jewish ethnology)

The Holocaust and Genocide

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Renwick Monroe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Data Section ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Political Behaviors ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter reviews the literature on genocide to define it, asks what scholars already know about it, and provides a context within which the stories that constitute the heart of the data section of this volume can be analyzed. While the Holocaust and World War II is often considered as so horrific that they become unique, the chapter argues that is not the case. Moreover, it remains conscious of the extent to which understanding the human psychology surrounding the Holocaust can lend insight into a far wider range of related, important, and ongoing political behaviors that emanate in forces deep-seated within the human psyche: prejudice; discrimination; ethnic, sectarian, religious hatred and violence.

Norman J.W. Goda, Barbara McDonald Stewart, Severin Hochberg, and Richard Breitman (eds.), To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945–1947. Bloomington and Washington, D.C.: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2015. 297 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truman Administration ◽  
Final Report ◽  
World War ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter reviews the book To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945–1947 (2015), edited by Norman J.W. Goda, Barbara McDonald Stewart, Severin Hochberg, and Richard Breitman. To the Gates of Jerusalem examines the origins, deliberations, and final report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine. The committee, of which U.S. diplomat James G. McDonald was a member, was created in November 1945 by the British Labour government and the Truman administration to address the humanitarian problem faced after World War II by Jews who survived the Holocaust. The diaries deal solely with this humanitarian plight and discuss only British and American policies. They reflect McDonald’s staunch support for the cause of the Holocaust survivors.

Aversion and Erasure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Dean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This book offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. The text explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. It argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of “Never Again”: as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are. The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. The book also argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis.

Secret Peace Overtures, the Holocaust, and Allied Strategy vis-à-vis Germany: Hungary in the Vortex of World War II

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Borhi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The U.S

This article explores how the U.S. and British governments' wartime strategy against Germany affected their policies toward Hungary, a country that had allied itself with Germany when World War II began. U.S. and British leaders wanted to facilitate an Allied landing on the French coast by diverting German troops to other theaters, thinning them out as much as possible. To this end, the United States and Britain were cool toward Hungary's peace overtures in 1943 and were willing to brook Germany's military incursions into Hungary and Romania in 1944 because German troops operating there could not be quickly redeployed to the west. Germany's occupation of those two countries led to the destruction of what remained of the once-large Jewish communities there, a tragic price that Allied leaders were ultimately willing to risk. The failure of Hungary's secret peace overtures also contributed to the later Soviet occupation of Hungary and the grim fate that befell the country after the war.

Lions and Lambs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Holocaust

Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. This book analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies—particularly the United States—were responsible for Germany's transformation. Instead, the book shows how common opposition to Adolf Hitler united the fractious groups that had once vied for supremacy under the Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy (1918–1933). The book's character-driven narrative follows ten Germans of rival worldviews who experienced the breakdown of Weimar society, lived under the Nazi dictatorship, and together assumed founding roles in the democratic reconstruction. While many have imagined postwar Germany as the product of foreign-led democratization, this study highlights the crucial role of indigenous ideas and institutions that stretched back decades before Hitler. Foregrounding the resolution of key conflicts that crippled the country's first democracy, the book presents a new model for understanding the origins of today's Federal Republic.

Kalmyk DPs and the Narration of Displacement in Post-World War II Europe

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Elvira Churyumova ◽  
Edward C. Holland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
Insight Into

Based on interview files and archival materials, this paper reconstructs the experiences of Kalmyk displaced persons (DPs) against the backdrop of the shifting international refugee regime in post-World War II Europe. Kalmyks came to western Europe in two waves: at the conclusion of the Russian Civil War in 1920 and during the German retreat from the Soviet Union in 1943–44. After the war, the majority of Kalmyks were repatriated; those who remained in Europe primarily ended up in DP camps in the American zone of western Germany. This paper details the strategies used by Kalmyk DPs to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union and eventually secure resettlement in the United States in 1951. Individual histories offer insight into how the Kalmyks as a group made themselves legible to the international community in light of a changing geopolitical environment and evolving racial regimes.

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