“Holocaust Literature and Autorevision- Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Elie Wiesel’s Debut as a Yiddish Writer and Journalist after the Holocaust
A one-of-a-kind comprehensive investigation into Elie Wiesel's legacy as a Yiddish writer and journalist who published his Yiddish writings in multiple genres, in various countries throughout the world over the course of more than five decades. This is an English translation of an article first published in Yiddish in the Yiddish Daily Forward in 2011, and then reissued this year, in revised and expanded form, in the journal Afn Shvel. When Wiesel himself read this article when it was first printed in the Yiddish Daily Forward, he responded expressing his amazement and appreciation, since up until that point, no one had yet written about his accomplishments as a Yiddish writer, especially not in such detail. The article discusses Wiesel's beginnings as a Yiddish writer and journalist in Paris in 1948, and then examines his subsequent literary and journalistic achievements in Yiddish, with reference to the Yiddish manuscript of the book Night (Un di velt hot geshvign) and the novels Shtile heldn (Quiet Heroes) and Elisha which Wiesel later serialized in the Yiddish press. The article includes the following sections: ~ Elie Wiesel’s Writerly Beginnings in Yiddish ~ ...And the World Kept Silent (Night) ~ 1945-1955: Elie Wiesel, Journalist and Yiddish Writer ~ A Torah Scholar and Talmudist ~ Elie Wiesel as a Yiddish Literary Critic ~ The Poetics of Elie Wiesel, the Yiddish Author
Violence: An International Journal, 2023
My contribution to this special issue investigates how Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath's 1993 novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr ("Jossel Wassermann's Homecoming") adopts a narrative practice of voicing Yiddish-speaking Holocaust victims in a post-Holocaust context for the purpose of imagining fictional alternatives to the historical violence inflicted upon them. Using a narrative strategy that I term the "almost-lost" story, Hilsenrath creates a narrative universe in which Yiddish voices, if not the actual Yiddish speakers, can be collected and saved as "anti-data" by disembodied "Quasselstimmen" (German for "chatty voices"). Coupled with strategic narrative interruptions that surface through iterations of narrative disfigurement, Hilsenrath gives rise to narrative possibilities for Jewish resistance within the scope of a literary text. I demonstrate how attentive readers can identify through Hilsenrath's highly complex narrative a signature for reconsidering the confluence of imaginative fiction and Holocaust history, emphasizing the reader's ethical dilemma in encountering this history, while also considering how fiction can point us in new directions as we endeavor to pry open and better understand the full scope of atrocities committed against humanity in search for a renewed commitment to humanity and justice in the aftermath of genocidal violence.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2023
At the turn of the twentieth-century Yiddish was standardized, and in the interwar period, this language became the basis for a thriving culture, both in Europe and in America. Yiddishland was for real with its 10–12 million Yiddish-speakers. In comparison, the number of Dutch-speakers living then was similar. However, during the Second World War, Germany visited the Katastrofe (Holocaust) on Europe’s Jews. Yiddishland was erased, survivors dispersed, mostly to America and Israel. Afterwards, silence followed, except for the Nuremberg Trials. But in 1951 the US freed many leading Nazis, who joined West Germany’s elite. Would the total destruction of Dutch speakers and their culture be met with a similar indifference? Instead, this guilty indifference of European and American facilitators-cum-beneficiaries towards the Katastrofe was offloaded onto the survivors themselves. A myth coalesced that it was survivors, who kept silent on the Katastrofe (xvii) until the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s (117). This ground-breaking monograph under review shows otherwise. Yiddish-speaking survivors, journalists and historians spoke up during the war, immediately after, and continued describing and analysing all aspects of the Katastrofe until the 1990s. The five surviving Yiddish historians from interwar Poland, Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Nachman Blumental, Joseph Kermish and Mark Dworzecki – wrote, edited, published, discussed, lectured and corresponded in Yiddish, across the entire world, faithful to the principle of accessing sources in their original languages (196, 212), in this case, Yiddish. When oral history was frowned upon, they interviewed survivors, mainly in Yiddish. These five historians also helped survivors write and publish izkor bikher (yizkor books) their shtetlekh (shtetls). Mark L. Smith shows how ‘novel approaches’ to the study of the Katastrofe were developed decades earlier by the aforementioned Yiddish historians (278). These Yiddish historians busted a variety of myths, for instance, of ‘Jewish cowardice’ (233), or that Jews ‘allowed themselves to be murdered’ (230). It was Dworzecki, who in 1958, created the world’s first chair in Holocaust studies at Bar-Ilan University. Earlier, when freedom of research was curbed in communist Poland, Blumental, Kermish and Trunk founded, in 1950, a Katastrofe research programme in the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel (29–30). It was the first museum of the Katastrofe, established in 1949. Eventually, the Yiddish historians began translating their works into other languages. But the primary sources remain available predominantly in Yiddish. The detailed annotated bibliographies of these five historians’ publications offer a gateway to this material. My sole criticism is that alongside Romanizations and English translations of Yiddish titles, these titles ought to be given in the original Yiddish-Hebrew script too. Finally, thanks to Smith’s monograph, at present no student of the Katastrofe will have an excuse to do research on the subject without a reading command of Yiddish. Would any scholar even consider probing into modern Germany without being able to read in German? Shouldn’t the same level of respect be accorded to Yiddishland, and the victims of the Katastrofe perpetrated by German genocidaires?
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2011
is a collection of eleven essays in which the authors explore how the aforementioned ideas contribute to the "contemporary state of the field" (x). As Spargo notes in the Introduction, "On the Cultural Continuities of Literary Representation," in each of the text's three sections, the authors "examine how writers-whether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from it-articulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, between the condition of bare life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence" (3-4). As such, when read together, the articles in these sections draw attention to the ways in which historical representation is "culturally mediated" and to the complex relationship between writing, history, and ethics (7). The first section of After Representation, "Is the Holocaust Still to be Written?" consists of four articles, "The Holocaust, History Writing, and the Role of Fiction" by Geoffrey Hartman, "Nostalgia and the Holocaust" by Sara R. Horowitz, "Death in Language: From Mado's Mourning to the Act of Writing" by Petra Schweitzer, and "Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status)" by Berel Lang. In each of these essays, Spargo notes that the authors examine the "competing imperatives operative in Holocaust writing-the pull between a language of radical discontinuity (e.g., the trauma as persistent interruption) and a language that supposes the necessity of continuity (drawing upon tradition, nostalgic memory, and the resources of communal identity)" (x-xi). Hartmann evaluates many of the tensions implicit in the relationship between fiction and history, and the role of writing within this construct, while Horowitz focuses on Eva Hoffmann's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language and the work of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer in order to introduce the layers of nostalgia in post-Holocaust family relationships, identity con