The Future of Holocaust Memory
Description
This book explores how contemporary Jewish writers and artists imagine the traumatic past of the Holocaust, in 'returning' to Poland or in encounters with the German Other, in their imagination and in reality. It asks what the future is of a history that haunts Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, and how the narratives of memory shape the way we think about the collective and personal past. It examines contemporary Jewish texts created by major authors in Israel and the Diaspora that display disturbing trends in the transmission of Holocaust memory which put in doubt or undermine the process of working through necessary for coming to terms with the past. Some are provocatively transgressive, others present double binds of the impossibility of becoming free from the past and achieving closure. This book therefore argues for the need to maintain a sustainable cultural framework that can give meaning to collective memory without, on the one hand, it becoming a compulsive obsession, or, on the other hand, being reduced to ceremonial commemoration or superficial universalization of global suffering from genocide or abuse.
Reviews / Votes
"
The Future of Holocaust Memory
is a probing analysis of contemporary Jewish narratives in literature and art, as well as an erudite challenge to contemporary critical approaches to Holocaust literature and art. It is also the first full-length study to raise painfully difficult questions on how we interpret this literature and art. It is a timely and provocative project." (James E. Young, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
"How do literary and artistic accounts of the Holocaust engage with traumatic memory? Do they free memory or entrap it? In this significant and impressive book, Efraim Sicher shows how an extremely extensive range of contemporary Jewish writers and artists imagine the traumatic past and negotiate - or fail to negotiate - the complexities of Holocaust memory. This work, both highly scholarly and very accessible, marks an important intervention in this field." (Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
More details
Person
Efraim Sicher is Emeritus Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Content
1. Introduction.- 2. The Future of the Past 1: Contemporary Jewish American Post-Holocaust Narratives.- 3. The Future of the Past 2: Second-Generation Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction.- 4. Postmodernizing the Holocaust 1: French Child Survivors and Second-Generation Writers.- 5. Postmodernizing the Holocaust 2: The Refusal of Knowledge.- 6. Home as 'Place of No Return': Journeys to Poland in the Writing of Child Survivors and the Second and Third Generations.- 7. Daughter of Germany: Desire and Power Relations in the Post-Holocaust Jewish Imaginary.- 8. Conclusion: Looking Forward to the Past?.