Since the end of World War II we have witnessed countless artistic responses to the Holocaust, yet we remain unable to adequately address the atrocities. While Theodor Adorno later rescinded his comments on the barbaric nature of writing poetry after Auschwitz, The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma begins with the possibility that he was right—that his admonition against poetry warns against employing representational modes that transgress the boundaries of the ethical when it comes to the Holocaust. There is a language, other than the language of representation, with which we might speak authentically about such atrocities. This study explores what it means for the world of literature to renounce the language of representation and retain the language of witness. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Geoffrey Hartman, and others the book focuses on the increasing tendency of contemporary writers to rely on non-representational approaches to storytelling in the context of trauma. This tendency is named the “midrashic impulse” given its similarity to ancient rabbinic approaches to the silences of the Hebrew bible through the creation of Midrash.

Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives examines a burgeoning genre of ethnic American literature called phantasmic trauma narratives, which use culturally specific modes of the supernatural to connect readers to historical traumas such as slavery and genocide. Drawing on trauma theory and using an ethnic studies methodology, this book shows how phantasmic novels and films present historical trauma in ways that seek to invite reader/viewer empathy about the cultural groups represented. In so doing, the author argues that these texts also provide models of interracial alliances to encourage contemporary cross-cultural engagement as a restorative response to historical traumas. Further, the author examines how these narratives function as sites of cultural memory that provide a critical purchase on the enormity of enslavement, genocide, and dispossession.

Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them. What does it mean to read, and to teach, Jewish American and Holocaust literatures in the early decades of the twenty-first century? New directions and new forms of expression have emerged, both in the invention of narratives and in the methodologies and discursive approaches taken toward these texts. The premise of this book is that despite moving farther away in time, the Holocaust continues to shape and inform contemporary Jewish American writing. Divided into analytical and pedagogical sections, the chapters present a range of possibilities for thinking about these literatures. Contributors address such genres as biography, the graphic novel, alternate history, midrash, poetry, and third-generation and hidden-child Holocaust narratives. Both canonical and contemporary authors are covered, including Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Anne Frank, Dara Horn, Joe Kupert, Philip Roth, and William Styron. “The range of critical approaches and authors examined makes this a valuable resource for scholars and teachers. Particularly in this troubling political moment, meditations on the new and continued relevance of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures for scholars, students, and the American public in general are invaluable.” — Sharon B. Oster, author of No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust – and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning – but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model. The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture. At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

“Literature of the Holocaust” courses, whether taught in high schools or at universities, necessarily cover texts from a broad range of international contexts. Instructors are required, regardless of their own disciplinary training, to become comparatists and discuss all works with equal expertise. This books offers analyses of the ways in which representations of the Holocaust—whether in text, film, or material culture—are shaped by national context, providing a valuable pedagogical source in terms of both content and methodology. As memory yields to post-memory, nation of origin plays a larger role in each re-telling, and the chapters in this book explore this notion covering well-known texts like Night (Hungary), Survival in Auschwitz (Italy), MAUS (United States), This Way to the Gas (Poland), and The Reader (Germany), while also introducing lesser-known representations from countries like Argentina or Australia.

This volume of eight essays written by French scholars analyzes Daniel Mendelsohn's first three volumes of nonfiction (The Elusive Embrace, 1999; The Lost, 2006; and An Odyssey, 2017) and includes an illustrated interview (2019) in which Mendelsohn tackles various aspects of his work as a literary and cultural critic, as a professor of classical literature, as a translator, and as a memoirist. The essay discussing The Elusive Embrace (1999) argues that, in addition to offering a subtle reflection on sexual identity and genres, Mendelsohn’s first volume already broadens his topic and patiently weaves links between ancient and present times, feeding his meditation with his knowledge of Greek culture and myths—a natural movement of back and forth which would become his signature. The Lost (2006), his much-acclaimed investigation on six members of his family who died during the period known as the Holocaust by bullets, is analyzed as a close-up on the disappearance of a whole world, the unspeakability of which Mendelsohn addressed through intertwining several languages, linguistic echoes, and biblical references. Finally, Mendelsohn’s recent An Odyssey (2017) is studied as a brilliant musing on teaching Homer’s masterpiece while building up a memoir on his declining father sitting among his students and allowing Homer’s universal questions and lessons to enlighten a father and son’s last journey.