Contemporary International Literature and the Shoah

Introduction

Sarah Minslow and Sławomir Jacek Żurek

This collection is a result of the research project Twenty-first Century Literature and the Holocaust: A Comparative and Multilingual Perspective completed in the years 2020–2023 and sponsored by a consortium of three universities: Bar-Ilan University (Israel), John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), and the University of Antwerp (Belgium).1 The research team consisted of 13 scholars from Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Israel, and the United States, who represented different academic circles, including literature, history, languages, and cultural studies. The research focused on Holocaust literature for children, young adults, and adults, written after 2000 in Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, German, and English, as well as on the different cultural traditions in which these literary works were created and the national narratives that influenced their creation. Over the course of six international seminars hosted by the research team, we heard from additional scholars working in our representative countries and in New Zealand, Canada, and Ukraine, some of whom have contributed to this volume.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, many worthwhile literary works on the Shoah have been published in different languages worldwide. Thus, the study of Holocaust literature has become an academic sub-discipline in its own right, though it has been heavily dominated by Anglo-American perspectives in Holocaust Literary Studies. Our project investigated the diversity of positions occupied by contemporary writers of Holocaust literature, both Jewish and non-Jewish. This collection highlights the commonalities and divergences our team identified when applying a comparatist framework to Holocaust representation across national and linguistic borders. Given the increasingly complex pathways of international publishing, distribution, translation, and consumption of books that represent the Shoah; the multiplicity of positions occupied by their authors; and the polyphonic engagement of the works with material cultures, memorialization efforts, and distortion or outright denial of the Holocaust on the international stage, this volume is timely. Further, with the rise in far-right fascism and antisemitism globally, the importance of interrogating the role Holocaust literature plays in reflecting and shaping national and international ideologies relevant to the Holocaust (and genocide more broadly) is urgent.

Unlike most literature about the Holocaust from the twentieth century, the works included in this volume are written mostly by authors born after the Holocaust, not by witnesses. The rise in books written by third and fourth generation authors and authors with no direct ties to Holocaust survivors or perpetrators has led to new areas of Holocaust literature worthy of investigation. This reality has influenced the forms, genres, and themes of literature about the Holocaust. While certain tropes of Holocaust literature remain—such as works based on individual biographies, stories featuring animal allegories, and the standard iconography of the Holocaust—twenty-first century works also explore various aspects of intergenerational trauma, perpetrator narratives, and temporal entanglements between the past and present. While these are portrayed differently in texts intended for young audiences than they are in works for adult intended readers, many of the themes and tropes apply dually. Family histories and memories that inform the protagonists’ present (particularly their mental states) and the broadening geographical diversity of experiences portrayed in popular narratives are two key features of note. Another key feature that may contribute to the rise in the pop-culturalization of Holocaust memory and literature is authors’ use of satire, humor, parody, and blasphemy to disrupt what has previously been seen as the unwritten rules of writing about the Holocaust. Further, there is a strong emphasis on the roles of non-human actors, including the environments of experience, and on blurring the distinct delineations between categories of victim, perpetrator, beneficiary, and bystander.

Given the immense complexity of our study—across countries, languages, ages of intended audiences, and genre conventions—in this volume Contemporary International Literature and the Shoah, we have three main thematic categories for shifts in the literary space. First, there is a focus on the different forms of remembrance of the Shoah in contemporary global literature. As the interest in memory studies increases, the ways in which authors participate in memorialization of historical atrocities shifts. Narratives include personal and collective memories, where authors, characters, and at times readers engage with concepts of postmemory (Hirsch), multidirectional memory (Rothberg), and repressed memories. The re-emergence of repressed memories can have negative consequences, even monstrous at times, but the sharing of such memories can also be cathartic and healing. Some of the novels engage with questions related to practices of narrative healing to work through traumatic memories. The second thematic category of contemporary reactions to the Shoah in literary discourse include the various narrative strategies authors employ to convey trauma. There are silences, but there is also a controntation with the past in more explicit depictions of previously evaded details. This is often achieved through intergenerational storytelling. Further, there is a consideration of narratives that offer alternative histories, such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, the use of humor or the abject, as in Arnon Grunberg’s The Jewish Messiah, and strategies authors employ when writing about historical atrocity for young audiences. The latter is particularly relevant when analyzing perpetrator narratives and linking the Shoah to contemporary issues related to identity politics, antisemitism, and the rise of fascism. A third concern throughout the collection emphasizes the various ways literature may shape the historical and cultural consciousness of successive generations of readers, with special focus on how narratives adhere to or disrupt national grand narratives of the Shoah. Authors employ genre complexity, play with temporalities, expand the geographical focus of stories, and combat denial by incorporating material cultures in literature. This volume also includes discussion of the iconography of the Holocaust across national borders—swastikas, Stars of David, striped pajamas, and train cars. Further, more contemporary authors blur the boundaries of genre conventions to entangle the past with the present and to portray different experiences of the Holocaust in fictional genres such as horror, magic realism, and fantasy. Such genre complexity, which once may have been considered inappropriate for Holocaust representation, is becoming increasingly popular.

Analyses of these themes are threaded throughout the volume, while the chapters are organized by their national focus on Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and German literatures. The last two chapters offer discussions of Anglophone literature about the Shoah across national borders in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Within these national literatures, a distinction is made between literature for children and young adults and literature for adults. However, this has not been successfully realized in all sections. For example, in the section on Russian literature, the lone chapter is devoted to literature written for adult audiences, mainly written in Israel by Russian-Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union. This is because in this linguistic circle there are no literary works on the Holocaust for children or young adults.2 This raises important questions about the absence of such works and how it contributes to a potential lack of global understanding in the contemporary world. Some deficiency can also be noticed in the German section, where there is only a polemical chapter devoted to literature for children and young adults but no chapter on the Holocaust literature for adults. However, German literature was discussed at length in the volume Das Gedächtnis an die Shoah in der polnischen und deutschsprachigen Literatur von Autorinnen und Autoren der zweiten und dritten Post-Shoah-Generation.3

The collection presented here affords a comparative view of how memory of the Holocaust, in subsequent generations of authors beyond survivors, has become a literary artifact, constructed in different ways in many national literatures. Writers use various aesthetics and narrative strategies; the volume provides a platform for investigating whether there is a conflict, for the first generation of Holocaust survivors, between the imperative of witness and a lack of trust in literary form and representation. Writers exploit new ways of representing the Holocaust, and comparative readers may observe the converging points within the linguistic and cultural diversity represented in this volume. Our contributors acknowledge the connections between different linguistic traditions given the origins of authors, their social and political backgrounds, and their writing styles. In addition, in the case of Holocaust literature for children and young adults, authors examine how it can be used in educational or institutional spaces to preserve (or at times distort) Holocaust memory.

The authors of the individual chapters pay special attention to literary strategies and mechanisms of transforming the memory of the Holocaust (though not always the author’s personal memory) into cultural artifacts. They discuss the complex processes of assimilating the experiences of Holocaust witnesses at a temporal interjection when most witnesses are no longer living. The seeming responsibility to tell the stories of Holocaust victims and perpetrators has thus been passed to second and third generation writers, raising important questions about the ethics of storytelling while destabilizing some generally conceived taboos of writing stories of witness or testimonies. Many contributors note the impact new media, photography, literature, comics, films, online exhibitions, and digital technologies have had on how the authors choose to represent the Holocaust for a generation of readers temporally removed from the events of World War II and invested heavily in visual culture and digital media for reading and learning. In analyzing the processes of mediatization and transformation of the memory of the Holocaust into literary artifacts, many of our contributors draw on theories from cultural studies, memory studies, trauma studies, and pedagogical studies. During the exploration and presentation of individual literary texts, they use elements of traditional structuralist, formalist, psychoanalytic, and hermeneutic models, as well as of contemporary research methodologies that examine, for instance, how constructions of family dynamics, relationships between citizens and nationhood, and educational demands for young readers differ and influence literary production.

The collection consists of six parts. Part I focuses on Dutch literary works including authors who live in the Netherlands and Belgium. In “Dutch and Flemish Twenty-First-Century Children’s Literature on the Holocaust: Teaching History Lessons for the Present and the Future,” Irena Barbara Kalla makes use of a corpus of texts collected for the project Comparative Approaches to Holocaust Literature in the Twenty-First Century, which comprises almost seventy books for young audiences. She presents an overview of these works to identify the ways in which they fulfil the educational function typically ascribed to literature for children. She discusses two books in greater detail: one written by Aline Sax and one by Benny Lindelauf, concluding that an “examination of the corpus yields the image of the child as an increasingly full-fledged participant in society.” The next chapter in the Dutch section, “Twenty-First-Century Dutch-language Literature on the Holocaust,” was co-authored by Bettine Siertsema and Kris Van Heuckelom. The authors present the main trends and developments in Dutch-language literature on the Holocaust for adults over the course of the past quarter century. They focus on two authors of Jewish origin who belong to the so-called second generation: Arnon Grunberg (Dutch) and Joseph Pearce (Flemish). They assert that “while Anne Frank’s war diary opens a long series of Dutch-language documents and literary works by Holland-based Jews affected by the Holocaust, Jewish writers who have written about their Holocaust experience can barely be found in Flanders.”

Part II of the book deals with the recent Polish literature on the Shoah. The key moment was in this context was the year 2000, when Jan Tomasz Gross published his historical essay Neighbors, in which he undermined the national myth of Polish innocence during the Holocaust. This book provoked a broad-ranging discussion in the public sphere and led to the publication of several hundred literary works on the Shoah in Polish. In her chapter on “Polish Literature for Children and Young Adults (Post-2000) on the Holocaust,” Sylwia Karolak analyzes novels for young audiences using narratological tools, with references to other methodologies of Holocaust literature studies. The chapter covers representations of the ghetto, of the “Aryan side,” of the hidden Jewish children, and finally of concentration and death camps. Sections devoted to Janusz Korczak and Irena Sendler can be singled out as referring to the relatively large numbers of books about these two heroic figures. The next chapter in the Polish part of the collection is Sławomir Jacek Żurek’s “Recent Polish Literature (Post-2000) as a Place-After-Jews.” In his study, the literature is treated as a symbolic place-after-Jews. It is arranged into four sections: “Place-after-pogrom,” “place-after-ghetto,” “place-after-lager,” and “place-after-Aryan-side.” Żurek argues that “In recent Polish literature, the victims of the Holocaust are still alive. They have been … restored to the local landscape … signaling the continuation Jewish life in the subconscious of Poles.” The presence of Jews is linked to specific places, people, and events (connected to the Shoah connotations) and suggests that there is no escape from the historical roles Poles played in the Holocaust.

Aleksei Surin, who is the author of the next chapter, “Russian-Language Literature of the Holocaust in the Twenty-First-Century: Poetics and Narrative Strategies,” researches fiction for adults written primarily by Russian-Jewish writers in Israel. In this chapter, he examines three narrative strategies employed by authors of the Russophone Holocaust prose, centered around the concepts of memory, knowledge, pedagogy, and time. Some writers resort to the aesthetics of postmemory to restore the Jewish world lost in the Shoah; others find in pedagogy and in knowledge the triumph of the individual in the face of catastrophe; still others delve into a mythical time to show the incompleteness of the Holocaust and its lasting effects, both personal and societal.

The two chapters in Part IV on Hebrew literature are authored by Israeli scholar Erga Heller. In “The Never-ending Search for the Truth in Fictional Testimonies: Presenting the Holocaust in Contemporary Hebrew Children’s and Young Adult Literature,” she highlights several contemporary picture books that reinforce the need for happy endings in children’s literature for young readers, especially in books that focus on historical atrocities. Further, she focuses on two Young Adult novels that portray how “the survivors’ current health demonstrates their past condition and life struggles.” In “New Voices and Old Wounds: Israeli Holocaust Literature at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” she provides examples of the artistic and fictional memories and testimonies about Israeli official memorialization of the Holocaust, and their part in constructing alternative national post-memories. The chapters highlight the similar characteristics of Israeli fiction about the Holocaust, such as illness, horror, and testimonies. Heller asserts that the central aspects that appear in most fictional texts are their testimonial nature and the dominant motive of home as a physical place, with metaphor, including its no-home dichotomy, as the leading topos.

The next part, “Repercussions of the Past: Children’s and Young Adult Literature on the Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Germany,” is written by Hadassah Stichnothe. In it, the author seeks to explain if and how German children’s and YA literature have changed since Zohar Shavit’s staunch criticism of authors’ “blame-shifting and self-victimization” in children’s literature in A Past Without Shadow (2005). Stichnothe provides examples that highlight “the possibilities and pitfalls of universalizing and the creative potential of the medium in visualizing the irretrievable loss and fragmentation of memory caused by the Shoah.” Part VI consists of two chapters devoted to Anglophone Holocaust literature: “Anglophone Children’s Literature and Holocaust Education in the Twenty-First Century” by Sarah Minslow and “Anglophone Adult Holocaust Literature in the Twenty-First Century” by Daniel Feldman. Minslow highlights specific trends and tropes in literature from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada and gives several examples to show how “twenty-first-century Anglophone Holocaust literature moves away from testimonials and to new modes of representing the Holocaust.” She argues that twenty-first century narratives move beyond the borders of Germany, Austria, and Poland and offer new insights into how people experienced the Holocaust in other parts of Europe, including in the “Bloodlands.” Further, she analyzes texts that include queer romance elements, distancing strategies, temporal connections between the past and present and across national borders. The chapter by Daniel Feldman surveys the diverse array of literary texts about the Holocaust written since 2000 for adult readers in English with particular focus on four critical motifs: intergenerational memory, perpetrator fiction, alternative history, and individual micro-histories. Following a critical overview of the twenty-first century adult Holocaust literature in English, this study discusses each of the four categories and illustrates key trends through examples.

Dutch and Flemish Twenty-First-Century Children’s Literature on the Holocaust: Teaching History Lessons for the Present and the Future

Irena Barbara Kalla*

ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an overview of Dutch-language children’s and young adult literature on the Holocaust published in the Netherlands and Flanders in the twenty-first century. The aim of this presentation is to identify the ways in which this literature fulfills the educational function characteristically ascribed to children’s literature. Today’s modes of narrating the Holocaust for young readers are depicted as the generational connection to the history of the mid-twentieth century is no longer part of their experience. The specificity of Holocaust representations in children’s literature of the Netherlands and Flanders as two cultural areas, and different modes of addressing the Holocaust are shown through the example of two books discussed in detail: De kleuren van het getto (2011) written by Aline Sax and illustrated by Caryl Strzelecki and De hemel van Heivisj (2010) by Benny Lindelauf. A review of both fiction and non-fiction reveals a pressing need for education. It is expressed, among other things, through the construction of complex characters, and the avoidance of definitiveness in the creation of verbal and visual narratives, which can be understood as stimulating critical thinking, and the use of authentic materials, including sometimes drastic photographs. At least two goals can be distinguished in education based on twenty-first century children’s literature dealing with the Holocaust. One is to provide historical knowledge, and the other is to discuss the current state of society, which many authors and educators do, using the history of the Holocaust as a starting point.

Dutch-language children’s and young adult literature on the Holocaust produced in the Netherlands and Flanders in the twenty-first century is abundant. The corpus compiled under the Comparative Approaches to Holocaust Literature in the twenty-first Century Project comprises almost 70 books for a young readership, and these texts are vary by genre and intended age groups. In this chapter, I present an overview of this corpus to identify the ways in which its items fulfill the educational function characteristically ascribed to children’s literature. Before doing that, I briefly discuss the Holocaust-themed Dutch-language children’s literature of the twentieth century with a view to capturing the distinctiveness of more recent children’s literature addressing this subject matter and the changes in representations of the Holocaust in writings for the young reading public. I also depict today’s modes of narrating the Holocaust for young readers who, born in the twenty-first century, as they are, typically no longer have the historical-cultural and generational connection to the history of the mid-twentieth century that was part of the experience of their grandparents and sometimes of their parents as well. Subsequently, I discuss in more detail two books: De kleuren van het getto (2011) written by Aline Sax and illustrated by Caryl Strzelecki4 and De hemel van Heivisj (2010) by Benny Lindelauf,5 representing Flemish and Dutch literature, respectively. The characteristic differences between these two books exemplify the specificity of Holocaust representations in the two cultural areas and modes of addressing the Holocaust as a theme in today’s Flemish and Dutch writings.