Imagining the Holocaust in Contemporary Jewish Literature

3 units

Recent public discourse on the Holocaust has displayed an anxiety that, with the gradual dying out of the survivor generation, the Holocaust too will soon pass into oblivion and one day be forgotten. Accompanying this anxiety about the vanishing eyewitness and the crisis of forgetting is often a parallel skepticism about narratives of the Holocaust that are not rooted in the direct experience of the survivor. Despite an injunction against fictional and imaginative representations of the Holocaust by survivors such as Elie Wiesel, however, the last twenty years have seen a wave of imaginative literature about the Holocaust written by non-survivors. This course will examine recent post-Holocaust literature, both fictional and autobiographical, by contemporary Jewish writers from Europe, Israel and the U.S., including works by Art Spiegelman, David Grossman, Aharon Appelfeld, Nathan Englander, Anne Michaels, Nava Semal, Patrick Modiano, Jurek Becker and others. Central to our inquiry into this literature will be the questions of language, narrative structure, referentiality, artistic representation, intergenerational trauma, vicarious memory and post-Holocaust Jewish identity.