Sven-Erik Rose | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)
Papers by Sven-Erik Rose
In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2023
This article examines the process of autorevision in prose fiction by Shaye Shpigl (also kno... more This article examines the process of autorevision in prose fiction by Shaye Shpigl (also known and published as Yeshaye Shpigl and Isaiah Spiegel), among the most prolific writers in the Lodz ghetto. Although many of the stories Shpigl wrote in the Lodz ghetto were lost, he was able to recover sixteen of them, the vast majority of which he went on to revise and publish in the early postwar years. Shpigl’s sixteen Lodz ghetto manuscripts constitute one of the most extensive extant corpora of wartime writings by an author who survived, and his postwar revisions thus afford us a rare window onto the different perspectives and demands of wartime and postwar writing. I focus on two examples of autorevision that richly highlight how the overriding concerns of Shpigl’s prose fiction written while events of the Holocaust were still unfolding are not always continuous, or even compatible, with his retrospective vantage point. In his postwar rewritings of his wartime stories, Shpigl quite evidently endeavored to make the original texts palatable for postwar Yiddish reading audiences. Whereas, as Naomi Seidman has argued, the discrepancies between Elie Wiesel’s Yiddish memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (1954) and La nuit (1958) provide a paradigmatic instance of translation of Holocaust discourse out of a Yiddish cultural context into a major language that would reach a predominantly non-Jewish readership, Shpigl’s Yiddish-Yiddish autorevisions powerfully exemplify an author’s felt compulsion to rewrite wartime writings from a postwar perspective even when no change of language — no literal translation — was involved.
Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, Volume 5
Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, Volume 5, 2021
The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger, 2017
I presented portions of this essay in various stages of its development at the Duke German Jewish... more I presented portions of this essay in various stages of its development at the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. I thank the audiences of these talks for their questions and remarks.
The German Quarterly, 2018
Comparative Literature, 2018
When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) wa... more When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger’s postwar anti-humanism and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide ...
Jewish Social Studies, 2017
Abstract:This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” (Kh... more Abstract:This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” (Khronik fun a mes-les), an experimental and densely intertextual autobiographical text written in the Warsaw ghetto in August 1941 and preserved in Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive. Goldin’s text self-consciously sifts the resources of European literature—and above all of modernist prose—in search of models for interpreting and articulating the extreme experience of the ghetto. By using the resources of Jewish and European literature as a lens through which to interpret the related experiences of human consciousness at its breaking point precipitated by starvation and of radical exclusion from the cosmopolitan cultural community that many eastern European Jews had embraced, Goldin’s text highlights the importance of attending to the literary dimension of Holocaust literature rather than approaching it merely as empirical documentation. This reading of Goldin aims to underscore the historical importance of Holocaust literature as literature, that is, how literary reading can afford a fuller and more complex appreciation of the ways Holocaust victims interpreted and lent meanings to their experiences.
This dissertation examines aspects of the Jewish encounter with modern discourses of subjectivity... more This dissertation examines aspects of the Jewish encounter with modern discourses of subjectivity. The project follows three interventions into discourses of Jewish subjectivity, two by Jewish authors who grapple with the question of how to speak as Jews in the modern German context, the third a discourse of radical social critique that strategically deploys flagrantly anti-Semitic stereotypes. Chapter One examines Lazarus Bendavid\u27s caustic pamphlet On Jewish Characteristics of 1793; Chapter Two explores the early career of Berthold Auerbach from his first literary activity until his breakthrough into literary stardom as a Heimatdichter with his Black Forest Village Stories of 1843; and Chapter Three investigates the function of Jewish figures in Karl Marx\u27s 1843 “On the Jewish Question” and The Holy Family of 1845 and compares Marx\u27s rhetorical construction of “real Jews” to his treatment—in part invention, in part discovery—of the proletariat. Highly politicized discourses on subjectivity proliferated in Germany in the period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the failed revolution of 1848. In this climate, Jews and Judaism became a privileged discursive site for interrogating subjectivity with the political imperatives this interrogation implied. The nexus of discourses on Judaism and subjectivity differed substantially in the two moments examined. Within Bendavid\u27s Kantian paradigm, the universal subject was essentially isomorphic with humanity at large as a moral-political community, and the “Jewish question” (avant la lettre ) was about the deficient yet potentially redeemable subjectivity of the Jew. The Young Hegelian social ontology of the self that was important for both Auerbach and Marx in the 1830\u27s and 40\u27s understood subjectivity as an obstacle to the realization of collective humanity. Each chapter explores the figuration of Jews as discursive objects in the works of the chapter\u27s central author and in key intertexts. I also investigate the three central authors from the standpoint of a problematics of enunciation. That is, I ask not only how each author speaks about Jews, but also how he does so in order to authorize his own speech. Bendavid and Auerbach each speak as a certain kind of Jew in a cultural and discursive field that made Jewish speech a treacherous undertaking. Marx deploys the figure of the obscenely “real Jew” in an effort to construct a viable locus of enunciation for his radical social critique
Jewish Social Studies, Jan 23, 2008
This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, prese... more This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, presented similar fantasies of integrating Jews into the state by decapitating Jewish heads. Such fantasies reached back to the Kantian foundation of each philosopher's conception of humanity and morality. Approaching the question of extending civil rights to Jews from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte came to the conclusion that the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation. Because it dramatically exemplifies possible dangers in Kantian moral universalism, Bendavid's peripheral and aberrant contribution to the celebrated corpus of Jewish Kantian philosophy can productively complicate how that tradition understood itself and how we continue to see it.
New German Critique, 2011
French Studies, 2007
From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Ma... more From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Mathieu Kassovitz is 'authentic enough' to speak for the ethnic banlieue. Yet La Haine is preoccupied with this very anxiety. This article examines how the film self-reflexively explores the place of Jewishness in the social crisis it dramatizes. La Haine achieves this 'Jewish' self-reflexivity primarily through the relationship its arguably most fully realized character, Vinz (a working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends Saïd (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African). As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships striving to become 'real', in other words, ethnic, masculine, authentic, the film also searches for a place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter with May 1968 and beyond. Vinz's ambivalent locus between, on the one hand, other minority figures with whom he wishes problematically to identify and, on the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he occupies a position of complex and uneasy proximity exemplifies a wider crisis of French Jews on the Left. The article concludes with a discussion of this crisis and how La Haine situates itself in the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France
Monatshefte, 2016
suicide as a solution to “Neigungen” gone awry in Werther, and in Faust perhaps he is reassuring ... more suicide as a solution to “Neigungen” gone awry in Werther, and in Faust perhaps he is reassuring us that it doesn’t always work out badly if you sell your soul to the devil. The book does not shrink back from other quite wide interpretations of Goethe’s intentions on matters of love: “For parents adopting children who might still wonder if they can love an adopted child as much as a biological one, Goethe’s literary texts provide an answer: yes” (188). Reassuring, but rather an odd source for this wisdom. Odder still, even though Gustafson does not attempt to identify any relationships in Goethe’s work as actually gay or lesbian, she does think he allays any “contemporary doubts about gay or lesbian families” because “Goethe’s texts foreground repeatedly the [ . . . ] loving elective affinities that draw same-sex couples together and that form the foundation for their loving families” (188). There are numerous details that cause one to lose confidence in this book. For example, when Eduard refers to his wife as his “A und O,” in a conversation in which the possible relationships among the four residents on the estate are designated by the letters a, b, c, and d, Gustafson wonders who “O” might be, and one can’t quite tell whether this is simply because she has missed the reference to the Book of Revelations, or because she is attempting to work on an obscure or accidental expansion of possible meanings. The details, nonetheless, are less important than the overall approach to what Goethe does and does not write. This raises a fundamental question about what is and what is not admissible as literary criticism. T.S. Eliot remarked in his essay “The Function of the Critic” that a respect for facts was the pinnacle of civilization. One might be inclined to scoff at such a rigid view until one appeared on trial or perhaps went through a political campaign. A fiction does not have to represent facts, but it remains, nonetheless, a fact whether it contains one motif or another. One is therefore guilty of a misrepresentation if one claims that a text contains language that it does not. The reader who feels a civilized responsibility either towards the law and politics of personal relationships, or towards the integrity of a work of art, needs to preserve a respectful skepticism toward what he or she will find in this volume. It seems to derive its image of vagueness and impermanence in human relationships from a time when same-sex attractions were expected to follow that disorderly pattern and were deemed unworthy of legal recognition. The implication that we can find a support for this view in a great classical author must be quite hurtful to those who struggled so long to bring about a sense of facts in our laws.
Nexus, 2021
"Vey dir" ("Woe to You") by Itzhak Katzenelson in the original Yiddish and in an English translat... more "Vey dir" ("Woe to You") by Itzhak Katzenelson in the original Yiddish and in an English translation by Ruth Whitman and Menachem Rothstein
Nexus, 2021
"A Poetics of Genocide: The Jewish Dead Confront their German Murderers in Itzhak Katzenelson's W... more "A Poetics of Genocide: The Jewish Dead Confront their German Murderers in Itzhak Katzenelson's Warsaw Ghetto Poem 'Vey dir'"
![Research paper thumbnail of A poetik fun skhite: yitshak katzenelson un yoysef kirman in varshever geto” [A Poetics of Genocide: Yitshak Katzenelson and Joseph Kirman in the Warsaw Ghetto]. Yiddish.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/57483474/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](“A poetik fun skhite: yitshak katzenelson un yoysef kirman in varshever geto” [A Poetics of Genoc... more “A poetik fun skhite: yitshak katzenelson un yoysef kirman in varshever geto” [A Poetics of Genocide: Yitshak Katzenelson and Joseph Kirman in the Warsaw Ghetto]. Yiddish. Afn Shvel Summer-Fall 2018 (no. 380-381): 16-22.
When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919-82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) wa... more When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919-82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the
Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic
experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger's postwar antihumanism
and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide into an irreducible intimacy that Heidegger seemed determined to avoid or deny.
This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin's " Chronicle of a Single Day " (Khronik f... more This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin's " Chronicle of a Single Day " (Khronik fun a mes-les), an experimental and densely intertextual autobiographical text written in the Warsaw ghetto in August 1941 and preserved in Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes archive. Goldin's text self-consciously sifts the resources of European literature—and above all of modernist prose—in search of models for interpreting and articulating the extreme experience of the ghetto. By using the resources of Jewish and European literature as a lens through which to interpret the related experiences of human consciousness at its breaking point precipitated by starvation and of radical exclusion from the cosmopolitan cultural community that many eastern European Jews had embraced, Goldin's text highlights the importance of attending to the literary dimension of Holocaust literature rather than approaching it merely as empirical documentation. This reading of Goldin aims to underscore the historical importance of Holocaust literature as literature, that is, how literary reading can afford a fuller and more complex appreciation of the ways Holocaust victims interpreted and lent meanings to their experiences.
In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2023
This article examines the process of autorevision in prose fiction by Shaye Shpigl (also kno... more This article examines the process of autorevision in prose fiction by Shaye Shpigl (also known and published as Yeshaye Shpigl and Isaiah Spiegel), among the most prolific writers in the Lodz ghetto. Although many of the stories Shpigl wrote in the Lodz ghetto were lost, he was able to recover sixteen of them, the vast majority of which he went on to revise and publish in the early postwar years. Shpigl’s sixteen Lodz ghetto manuscripts constitute one of the most extensive extant corpora of wartime writings by an author who survived, and his postwar revisions thus afford us a rare window onto the different perspectives and demands of wartime and postwar writing. I focus on two examples of autorevision that richly highlight how the overriding concerns of Shpigl’s prose fiction written while events of the Holocaust were still unfolding are not always continuous, or even compatible, with his retrospective vantage point. In his postwar rewritings of his wartime stories, Shpigl quite evidently endeavored to make the original texts palatable for postwar Yiddish reading audiences. Whereas, as Naomi Seidman has argued, the discrepancies between Elie Wiesel’s Yiddish memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (1954) and La nuit (1958) provide a paradigmatic instance of translation of Holocaust discourse out of a Yiddish cultural context into a major language that would reach a predominantly non-Jewish readership, Shpigl’s Yiddish-Yiddish autorevisions powerfully exemplify an author’s felt compulsion to rewrite wartime writings from a postwar perspective even when no change of language — no literal translation — was involved.
Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, Volume 5
Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, Volume 5, 2021
The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger, 2017
I presented portions of this essay in various stages of its development at the Duke German Jewish... more I presented portions of this essay in various stages of its development at the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. I thank the audiences of these talks for their questions and remarks.
The German Quarterly, 2018
Comparative Literature, 2018
When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) wa... more When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger’s postwar anti-humanism and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide ...
Jewish Social Studies, 2017
Abstract:This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” (Kh... more Abstract:This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” (Khronik fun a mes-les), an experimental and densely intertextual autobiographical text written in the Warsaw ghetto in August 1941 and preserved in Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive. Goldin’s text self-consciously sifts the resources of European literature—and above all of modernist prose—in search of models for interpreting and articulating the extreme experience of the ghetto. By using the resources of Jewish and European literature as a lens through which to interpret the related experiences of human consciousness at its breaking point precipitated by starvation and of radical exclusion from the cosmopolitan cultural community that many eastern European Jews had embraced, Goldin’s text highlights the importance of attending to the literary dimension of Holocaust literature rather than approaching it merely as empirical documentation. This reading of Goldin aims to underscore the historical importance of Holocaust literature as literature, that is, how literary reading can afford a fuller and more complex appreciation of the ways Holocaust victims interpreted and lent meanings to their experiences.
This dissertation examines aspects of the Jewish encounter with modern discourses of subjectivity... more This dissertation examines aspects of the Jewish encounter with modern discourses of subjectivity. The project follows three interventions into discourses of Jewish subjectivity, two by Jewish authors who grapple with the question of how to speak as Jews in the modern German context, the third a discourse of radical social critique that strategically deploys flagrantly anti-Semitic stereotypes. Chapter One examines Lazarus Bendavid\u27s caustic pamphlet On Jewish Characteristics of 1793; Chapter Two explores the early career of Berthold Auerbach from his first literary activity until his breakthrough into literary stardom as a Heimatdichter with his Black Forest Village Stories of 1843; and Chapter Three investigates the function of Jewish figures in Karl Marx\u27s 1843 “On the Jewish Question” and The Holy Family of 1845 and compares Marx\u27s rhetorical construction of “real Jews” to his treatment—in part invention, in part discovery—of the proletariat. Highly politicized discourses on subjectivity proliferated in Germany in the period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the failed revolution of 1848. In this climate, Jews and Judaism became a privileged discursive site for interrogating subjectivity with the political imperatives this interrogation implied. The nexus of discourses on Judaism and subjectivity differed substantially in the two moments examined. Within Bendavid\u27s Kantian paradigm, the universal subject was essentially isomorphic with humanity at large as a moral-political community, and the “Jewish question” (avant la lettre ) was about the deficient yet potentially redeemable subjectivity of the Jew. The Young Hegelian social ontology of the self that was important for both Auerbach and Marx in the 1830\u27s and 40\u27s understood subjectivity as an obstacle to the realization of collective humanity. Each chapter explores the figuration of Jews as discursive objects in the works of the chapter\u27s central author and in key intertexts. I also investigate the three central authors from the standpoint of a problematics of enunciation. That is, I ask not only how each author speaks about Jews, but also how he does so in order to authorize his own speech. Bendavid and Auerbach each speak as a certain kind of Jew in a cultural and discursive field that made Jewish speech a treacherous undertaking. Marx deploys the figure of the obscenely “real Jew” in an effort to construct a viable locus of enunciation for his radical social critique
Jewish Social Studies, Jan 23, 2008
This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, prese... more This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, presented similar fantasies of integrating Jews into the state by decapitating Jewish heads. Such fantasies reached back to the Kantian foundation of each philosopher's conception of humanity and morality. Approaching the question of extending civil rights to Jews from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte came to the conclusion that the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation. Because it dramatically exemplifies possible dangers in Kantian moral universalism, Bendavid's peripheral and aberrant contribution to the celebrated corpus of Jewish Kantian philosophy can productively complicate how that tradition understood itself and how we continue to see it.
New German Critique, 2011
French Studies, 2007
From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Ma... more From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Mathieu Kassovitz is 'authentic enough' to speak for the ethnic banlieue. Yet La Haine is preoccupied with this very anxiety. This article examines how the film self-reflexively explores the place of Jewishness in the social crisis it dramatizes. La Haine achieves this 'Jewish' self-reflexivity primarily through the relationship its arguably most fully realized character, Vinz (a working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends Saïd (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African). As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships striving to become 'real', in other words, ethnic, masculine, authentic, the film also searches for a place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter with May 1968 and beyond. Vinz's ambivalent locus between, on the one hand, other minority figures with whom he wishes problematically to identify and, on the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he occupies a position of complex and uneasy proximity exemplifies a wider crisis of French Jews on the Left. The article concludes with a discussion of this crisis and how La Haine situates itself in the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France
Monatshefte, 2016
suicide as a solution to “Neigungen” gone awry in Werther, and in Faust perhaps he is reassuring ... more suicide as a solution to “Neigungen” gone awry in Werther, and in Faust perhaps he is reassuring us that it doesn’t always work out badly if you sell your soul to the devil. The book does not shrink back from other quite wide interpretations of Goethe’s intentions on matters of love: “For parents adopting children who might still wonder if they can love an adopted child as much as a biological one, Goethe’s literary texts provide an answer: yes” (188). Reassuring, but rather an odd source for this wisdom. Odder still, even though Gustafson does not attempt to identify any relationships in Goethe’s work as actually gay or lesbian, she does think he allays any “contemporary doubts about gay or lesbian families” because “Goethe’s texts foreground repeatedly the [ . . . ] loving elective affinities that draw same-sex couples together and that form the foundation for their loving families” (188). There are numerous details that cause one to lose confidence in this book. For example, when Eduard refers to his wife as his “A und O,” in a conversation in which the possible relationships among the four residents on the estate are designated by the letters a, b, c, and d, Gustafson wonders who “O” might be, and one can’t quite tell whether this is simply because she has missed the reference to the Book of Revelations, or because she is attempting to work on an obscure or accidental expansion of possible meanings. The details, nonetheless, are less important than the overall approach to what Goethe does and does not write. This raises a fundamental question about what is and what is not admissible as literary criticism. T.S. Eliot remarked in his essay “The Function of the Critic” that a respect for facts was the pinnacle of civilization. One might be inclined to scoff at such a rigid view until one appeared on trial or perhaps went through a political campaign. A fiction does not have to represent facts, but it remains, nonetheless, a fact whether it contains one motif or another. One is therefore guilty of a misrepresentation if one claims that a text contains language that it does not. The reader who feels a civilized responsibility either towards the law and politics of personal relationships, or towards the integrity of a work of art, needs to preserve a respectful skepticism toward what he or she will find in this volume. It seems to derive its image of vagueness and impermanence in human relationships from a time when same-sex attractions were expected to follow that disorderly pattern and were deemed unworthy of legal recognition. The implication that we can find a support for this view in a great classical author must be quite hurtful to those who struggled so long to bring about a sense of facts in our laws.
Nexus, 2021
"Vey dir" ("Woe to You") by Itzhak Katzenelson in the original Yiddish and in an English translat... more "Vey dir" ("Woe to You") by Itzhak Katzenelson in the original Yiddish and in an English translation by Ruth Whitman and Menachem Rothstein
Nexus, 2021
"A Poetics of Genocide: The Jewish Dead Confront their German Murderers in Itzhak Katzenelson's W... more "A Poetics of Genocide: The Jewish Dead Confront their German Murderers in Itzhak Katzenelson's Warsaw Ghetto Poem 'Vey dir'"
“A poetik fun skhite: yitshak katzenelson un yoysef kirman in varshever geto” [A Poetics of Genoc... more “A poetik fun skhite: yitshak katzenelson un yoysef kirman in varshever geto” [A Poetics of Genocide: Yitshak Katzenelson and Joseph Kirman in the Warsaw Ghetto]. Yiddish. Afn Shvel Summer-Fall 2018 (no. 380-381): 16-22.
When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919-82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) wa... more When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919-82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the
Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic
experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger's postwar antihumanism
and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide into an irreducible intimacy that Heidegger seemed determined to avoid or deny.
This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin's " Chronicle of a Single Day " (Khronik f... more This article elaborates a close reading of Leyb Goldin's " Chronicle of a Single Day " (Khronik fun a mes-les), an experimental and densely intertextual autobiographical text written in the Warsaw ghetto in August 1941 and preserved in Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes archive. Goldin's text self-consciously sifts the resources of European literature—and above all of modernist prose—in search of models for interpreting and articulating the extreme experience of the ghetto. By using the resources of Jewish and European literature as a lens through which to interpret the related experiences of human consciousness at its breaking point precipitated by starvation and of radical exclusion from the cosmopolitan cultural community that many eastern European Jews had embraced, Goldin's text highlights the importance of attending to the literary dimension of Holocaust literature rather than approaching it merely as empirical documentation. This reading of Goldin aims to underscore the historical importance of Holocaust literature as literature, that is, how literary reading can afford a fuller and more complex appreciation of the ways Holocaust victims interpreted and lent meanings to their experiences.