Yiddish Survivors’ Literature (a research project).docx (original) (raw)

The study of the Jewish response to the Holocaust, as part of the research and teaching of Holocaust literature, especially the corpus of Yiddish literature written in the ghettos and concentrations camps, is a relatively new discipline that is slowly developing . The corpus of Yiddish survivors’ literature has not yet been researched and analyzed. Until recently, the main emphasis was placed on the study of Jewish literature written in the ghettos and camps in Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages, and especially on authors who were murdered. This corpus of assembled Yiddish literature has been partly analyzed and anthologized, becoming a specific discipline in Holocaust studies as of the early 1990s . The study of Yiddish literature composed about the Nazi concentration camps, by authors who survived the Holocaust, is only at its beginnings. Apart from occasional articles, references to authors-survivors by historians, and assorted lists in anthologies and in some other studies, no systematic study has yet relied on a defined corpus, in Yiddish, of survivors-authors. For the most part, the tacit assumption has been that the development of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century was interrupted by events in Europe. The assumption was that this literature died out – meaning, by implication, that the broken chain of Jewish existence in Europe inevitably arrested Yiddish literary creativity after the war. Yiddish Survivors’ Literature has only recently been acknowledged as an integral part of the Jewish response to the Holocaust, notwithstanding the work already done on the She’eirit Hapleita . This assumption is perhaps one of the reasons for the neglect of research on Yiddish authors-survivors, who immigrated to the United States, Israel, France, Canada, Argentina, and many other countries. Many of these authors-survivors lived not only in the ghettos under Nazi rule, but were also sent to the different Nazi camps. Their Holocaust experience included the concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps. Their Yiddish writings, following liberation, usually bear impressions of the Second World War under Nazi rule, and their life experiences in all stages of Nazi persecution and mass-murder (including the camps in which they were incarcerated).