Full Description
A study of literature written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos emphasizes how authors processed their horrific experiences through poetry and prose.
Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This is the first study devoted to how little known but essential authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the gothic horror tale. Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose's readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author's Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction
I . Novel
1 Novelistic Time, Historical Time, and the
End of Omniscience: Zelman Skalov
II . Poetry
Three Poems from the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942
2 Shmuel Marvil's Torn Words
3 The Jewish Dead Confront Their German Murderers:
Itzhak Katzenelson
4 Yoysef Kirman's Poetics of Duration
III . Short Prose: One
Self-Writing in the Warsaw Ghetto
5 Writing the Hungering Self in a Modernist Key:
Leyb Goldin
6 The Autobiography of a Number: Yehoshue Perle
I V. Short Prose: Two
Revisiting Popular Literary Genres in the Lodz
and Vilna Ghettos
7 Sherlock Holmes in the Warsaw and Vilna
Ghettos: Gustawa Jarecka and Herman Kruk
8 Oskar Rosenfeld's Haunting Literary Dream
in the Lodz Ghetto
9 Ghetto Gothic: Shaye Shpigl's Umheymlekhe
Tales from the Lodz Ghetto
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
