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Full Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2025
How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there?
Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust.
Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel's literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of "poesis in extremis" when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction (Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher)
Part I
1. Elie Wiesel's Night: Literature as Testimony (Efraim Sicher)
Part II
2. A Poetics of the Holocaust?: Celan, Sutzkever, Milosz (Efraim Sicher)
3. Writing Nothing: Negation and Subjectivity in the Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis (Daniel Feldman)
4. Miklós Radnóti: Postcards from a Death March (Efraim Sicher)
5. Wladymir Szlengel's Ghetto Poems: Writing to the Dead (Daniel Feldman)
6. "Poem in a Bottle": Itzhak Katzenelson's Song of the Murdered Jewish People (Daniel Feldman)
Part III
7. Translating Oral Memory in Ida Fink's "Traces" (Daniel Feldman)
Postscript (Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
