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Over the last several decades, video testimony with aging Holocaust survivors has brought these witnesses into the limelight. Yet the success of these projects has made it seem that little survivor testimony took place in earlier years. In truth, thousands of survivors began to recount their experience at the earliest opportunity. This book provides the first full-length case study of early postwar Holocaust testimony, focusing on David Boder's 1946 displaced persons interview project. In July 1946, Boder, a psychologist, traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps and what he called "shelter houses." During his nine weeks in Europe, ...
Women's Holocaust Writing, the first book of literary criticism devoted to American Holocaust writing by and about women, extends Holocaust and literary studies by examining women's artistic representations of female Holocaust experiences. Beyond racial persecution, women suffered gender-related oppression and coped with the concentration camp universe in ways consistent with their prewar gender socialization. Through close, insightful reading of fiction S. Lillian Kremer explores Holocaust representations in works distinguished by the power of their literary expression and attention to women's diverse experiences.
In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, authority figures, resistors, chroniclers, or ideologues. This volume examines men's experiences during the Holocaust. Chapters first focus on the years of genocide: Jewish victims of National Socialism, Nazi soldiers, Catholic priests enlisted in the Wehrmacht, Jewish doctors in the ghettos, men from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and Muselmänner in the camps. The book then moves to the postwar context: German Protestant theologians, Jewish refugees, non-Jewish Austrian men, and Jewish masculinities in the United States. The contributors articulate the male experience in the Holocaust as something obvious (the everywhere of masculinities) and yet invisible (the nowhere of masculinities), lending a new perspective on one of modernity's most infamous chapters.
"In Her Father's Eyes sheds light on a fascinating but underexamined corner of Central Europe, where anti-Jewish measures often exceeded Nazi Germany's in their harshness. By bridging prewar and wartime periods, the diary also provides a rich context for understanding the history from which the Holocaust emerged. And all the while, it remains a moving story of a father's profound love for his only child."--BOOK JACKET.
In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory. This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips...
A provocative study of a French Holocaust controversy of the 1960s and the dynamics of postwar memory.
In this book, Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.
In History's Grip concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny. In History's Grip is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.
This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank’s Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that t...
Witness through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the prelude, progress, and aftermath of the Holocaust. Criticism of Holocaust literature is an emerging field of inquiry, and as might be expected, the most innovative work has been concentrated on the vanguard of European and Israeli Holocaust literature. Now that American fiction has amassed an impressive and provocative Holocaust canon, the time is propitious for its evaluation. Witness Through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the prelude, progress, and aftermath of the Holocaust. The unifying critical approach is the textual explication of themes and literary method, occasional comparative references to international Holocaust literature, and a discussion of extra-literary Holocaust sources that have influenced the creative writers' treatment of the Holocaust universe.