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INTRODUCTION

Like other literary responses to catastrophe, Holocaust literature necessarily locates the era in a number of national and cultural literary traditions. Even the definition of the Holocaust itself depends on who writes about it, under what conditions, and to which audience. In its broadest sense Holocaust literature consists of all of the literary responses to the destruction of European Jewry and other peoples by the German Nazi state and its collaborators during World War II. As such, it is necessarily an international literature, with works in all of the European languages as well as in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. In its most expansive definition Holocaust literature thus includes the diaries of victims and memoirs of survivors; chronicles and documents compiled collectively by community groups and assembled in the forms of archives and "memorial books"; novels and short stories on Holocaust-related themes by those who witnessed the destruction as well as by those removed from it; poetry and drama from the concentration camps and ghettos as well as that composed after the war with aspects of the Holocaust as the subject; ballads and songs written both to inspire fighters in the ghettos during the war and to commemorate the Holocaust afterward; and religious responses that relate the events of the Holocaust in the form of traditional Jewish legends and parables. In the 1980s the descendants of Holocaust survivors began to add their own unique voices—as found in the so-called commix and in rock and roll lyrics—to the more traditional literary genres.

Indeed, the very languages in which these works are written determine their shape, content, and preoccupying themes. In choosing to write in Hebrew instead of Yiddish, for example, the ghetto diarists Chaim A. Kaplan and Zelig Kalmanovitsh may not have deliberately chosen every specific allusion and figure in the Hebrew over those used in Emmanuel Ringelblum's Yiddish diary, but they located events within different linguistic realms all the same. Whereas Hebrew tends to recall events in the sanctified context of Scripture and rabbinical disputation, writers in Yiddish often emphasized the details of daily life and its hardships. Conversely, questions of theodicy, covenant, and scriptural antecedent have a lexicon in Hebrew they do not have in Yiddish.

In some cases whether a Holocaust literature even came to exist depended on the national literary traditions of the victims. Because Jewish religious tradition is an essentially literary one, with a 2,500-year-old history of catastrophe responses, remembering the Holocaust in writing assumed something approaching a religious obligation. Both because Jews were the principal racial victims of the Nazis and because their tradition mandated it, Jewish writers have thus accounted for the great majority of the thousands of Holocaust literary works. By contrast, the primarily oral tradition of the tribes of Sinti and Roma (commonly, if somewhat pejoratively, known as Gypsies) practically guaranteed a frightful literary silence on their part. Because their story depended on the voices of the witness-victims themselves, the history of the Gypsies' deportations and mass murder died in the throats of the victims and so remains largely unwritten.

At some point nearly all of the writers of the Holocaust, whether a diarist like Kaplan or memoirists like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, have lamented the sheer impossibility of their task: how to describe what seems indescribable. How could they make believable what seemed incredible even to the eyewitnesses? Moreover, many writers have been plagued by the fear that the narrative act itself, with its intrinsic ordering properties, would betray what seemed to be the completely inchoate experience of the ghetto. How was it possible, Kaplan asked, to describe a disorderly thing in an orderly fashion? For writers attempting to leave behind a literature of testimony, questions of how to describe events without distorting them assumed nearly paralyzing significance. In most cases, however, the writers concluded that, as difficult as their literary conundrum seemed, silence was not an alternative. They recognized that without a literature the Holocaust would have been a self-consuming catastrophe, giving the killers a posthumous victory.

Every literary form represents the Holocaust in a slightly different way, each conveying different shades of meaning and a different understanding of the events. Because they were written from within the whirlwind, for example, ghetto and concentration camp diaries suggest themselves rhetorically as literal remnants of the events. At the same time, since they wrote from day to day without knowing their end, the diarists are dependent on readers to complete their stories. For a sense of the chaotic realities facing inmates of the concentrations camps and ghettos, the details of daily life under Nazi siege, and an understanding of how the victims grasped their circumstances at the time, the diaries of writers like Ringelblum, Kaplan, Kalmanovitsh, Moshe Flinker, Anne Frank, Eva Heyman, and others remain invaluable as sources.

By contrast, the hundreds of Holocaust survivor-memoirists necessarily have written with the advantage of hindsight, which has allowed them to know from the beginning of their recollections how it turned out. Although they, like the diarists, have been inspired by the powerful urges to testify to such crimes and to order otherwise inchoate experiences, the memoirists also have had time to

meditate on their survival and to reflect on their later lives in the light of their people's destruction. Survivors like Levi and Wiesel were thus able to find and relate the significance of early events in the light of later ones. For this reason the shape of a Holocaust memorist's work may depend as much on the writer's later preoccupations as on the events themselves. The incoherence of events as experienced at the time is often relieved by the much more complete understanding a survivor years later brings to the past. As a result, the versions of survival we find in memoirs are often laced with the foreboding of those who know that the worst was indeed possible.

On the one hand, literary historians agree that it is crucial to distinguish categorically between eyewitness literature, such as the diary and memoir, and the more imaginative realm of novels and short stories. Nevertheless, it has also become clear that the lines between factual and fictional literature of the Holocaust are not always clear and are often blurred by memoirists and novelists alike. A memoir like Wiesel's Night, for example, while having a factual basis in the author's actual experiences during the war, also contains both formal elements of the parable and profoundly symbolic imagery. By opening his memoir with the story of Moshe the Beadle, who survived an early mass execution of Jews only to be disbelieved by the other inhabitants of the memoirist's Hungarian shtetl, Wiesel is able parabolically to warn his own audience against disbelieving the harrowing account they are about to read. The facts of the memoir remain true even as their meaning is conveyed in the symbolic imagery of the parable.

Similarly, if toward entirely different ends, Holocaust fiction often borrows heavily from the nonfictional discourse of diaries and memoirs. In particular, what has come to be called the "documentary fiction" of the Holocaust continues to raise some of the most troubling critical issues surrounding its incorporation of eyewitness accounts. To what extent, for example, does a documentary novel of the Holocaust such as Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar or John Hersey's The Wall document events, and to what extent does it fictionalize them? Because the novel has traditionally sustained a certain fact-fiction ambiguity as part of its discourse, both writers and readers have asked if it is an appropriate form for the representation of true but altogether unbelievable events.

As a result, some Holocaust novelists, like Jean-François Steiner in Treblinka, have gone to great lengths to assert an absolute link between their fiction and the historical facts of the Holocaust. Others, like the novelist D.M. Thomas, in reference to his book The White Hotel, have claimed on ethical grounds that they have no right to imagine such suffering and therefore have had to rely on the voices of actual witnesses. In both cases it is difficult to know whether such documentary claims are generated by the needs of history or of literature, whereby the claims are fabricated as part of the novels' essential fiction. The problem with these and other documentary novels of the Holocaust is that, by mixing actual events with completely fictional characters, the works, citing literary license, simultaneously relieve themselves of an obligation to historical fact even as they imbue their fiction with the historical authority and pathos of real events.

Other issues in Holocaust fiction emerge in comparisons of the national contexts of such works. For example, in comparing the brilliant short tales of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk with those of Tadeusz Borowski in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, one is struck by the stark differences between their preoccupations, themes, and voices. In her vividly told Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Nomberg-Przytyk brings into sharp relief the unique experiences of women in the concentration camps. She shows the ways in which a woman's history of subjugation provided her with a ready-made literary lexicon for the humiliation and degradation she found at the hands of the Nazis, even as she reflects on her own mixed identity in the camp as a Jewish woman and a Polish socialist. Borowski, on the other hand, was a non-Jewish Pole interned at Auschwitz as a socialist who came to be regarded after the war as one of Poland's greatest young writers. Although his personal conduct in the camp was by all accounts beyond reproach, even at times heroic in his assistance to the harder-pressed Jewish inmates, Borowski uses a fictional narrator who relates the stories through the self-accusing eye of someone seemingly inured to the suffering and death surrounding him. Moreover, because nothing before or after the war seemed to compare to the atrocities he had witnessed in Auschwitz and because he believed no one would comprehend them, Borowski limited his language and metaphors to that of the camp's realities, thus sealing both his and his readers' minds in the concentration camp universe, from which he would allow no literary escape.

Unlike Borowski's mercilessly direct depictions of horror in Auschwitz, other writers such as the Czernowitz-born Israeli novelist and survivor Aharon Appelfeld have eschewed any pretense of documentation for the larger, more universally humane truths of despair, alienation, and hope, which he reveals in lyrically spare tales. In novels such as Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders, Tzili, The Immortal Bartfuss, and Katerina, among a dozen others, Appelfeld hews closely to the details of a war-ravaged childhood even as he explores the souls of those trapped in the times. His stories of an oblivious Jewish community on the eve of annihilation, of children shunted among Carpathian villages, or of the perpetually displaced survivor at home only in a criminal netherworld between the concentration camps and refuge in Israel have been translated into a dozen languages and continue to find a universal resonance among the world's readers.

In the 1960s and early 1970s other Israeli novelists (some of them poets as well), including Yehuda Amichai, Hanoch Bartov, Yoram Kaniuk, and Haim Gouri, were more apt to explore the gap between their identities as Israeli Jews in their own land and their memory of a time when Jews in exile had been destroyed. In the case of Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963) and of Gouri's The Chocolate Deal (1965), national preoccupations with reparations, archaeology, and a newly found Jewish self-sufficiency provided thematic backdrops for trying to understand what had been lost and just how terrible the destruction had been, despite a new life in Israel. In the The Brigade (1965) Bartov similarly probed the Israeli's conflicted impulses toward revenge and rescue by telling the story of a brigade of Palestinian Jews in Germany as part of the Allied occupation forces after the war. Perhaps the richest novel of this time in both spiritual and psychological terms, as well as in its intricate fabular structure, is Kaniuk's Adam Resurrected (1971), a devastating tale of a survivor's memory and sanity, the conflation of his past and present as set in an Israeli psychiatric institution.

Later in Israel the survivor-novelist Ida Fink and the postwar-generation essayist and novelist David Grossman have added brilliantly complicating strains to the Holocaust literary canon from two very different perspectives. In her collection of short stories A Scrap of Time (1985), Fink distilled the terror and madness of day-to-day life for ordinary, unheroic Jews trying to get by a day at a time in Poland during the war. Rife with quotidian details of individual moments, Fink's stories restored the richness of life lost as it was being pulled apart one strand at a time. And then, rather than attempting to find reassuring meaning in such moments, the narrator herself is always on the verge of unremembering such moments altogether. From a completely different vantage point, David Grossman also made his inability to remember events he never experienced directly the subtext of his enormously ambitious novel See Under: Love (1985). Regarded by many as the greatest single work of the postwar generation, Grossman's novel is told through the wildly imaginative eyes of a child desperately trying to penetrate the stories of his parents' generation from "the land of there"—Europe and the Holocaust—removed in both time and place.

Indeed, the range of possible literary responses to the Holocaust by the descendants of survivors has continued to grow. In an age dominated by popular culture, the children of survivors are as likely to distinguish themselves in the words of rock songs as they are in classical verse. In their recording Ashes and Dust the Israeli musicians Yehuda Poliker and Yakov Gilad pair lyrics responding to the Holocaust with haunting instrumentals. Like Poliker and Gilad, the second-generation American novelists Melvin Bukiet and Thane Rosenbaum have made their relationship to Holocaust memory—not the Holocaust as such—the subject of their art.

The treatment of the Holocaust as a vicarious past may have found its most remarkable expression in Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning "commix" of the Holocaust, Maus—A Survivor's Tale . For as Spiegelman himself has been quick to point out, Maus is not about the Holocaust so much as about the survivor's tale itself and the artist-son's recovery of it. Just as his father recalled what had happened to him at the hands of the Nazis, his son Art recalls what happened to him at the hands of his father as well as the effect his father's stories had on him. Although some early reviewers were taken aback by the audacity of representing the Holocaust in cartoons, that Spiegelman chose to render his father's tale of survival in this form is neither surprising nor controversial. After all, as a comics artist and founder of Raw magazine, Spiegelman only turned to what has always been his working artistic medium. As for possible objections to folding the deadly high seriousness of the Holocaust into what some would regard as the trivial low seriousness of the comics, Spiegelman has pointed to the ways in which the medium itself has raised—and dismissed—issues of decorum as part of its raison d'être.

That comics would serve such a story so well, however, is startling. Yet Spiegelman seems to have realized that, in order to remain true both to his father's story and to his own experience of it, he would have to remain true to his medium. In doing so, he has also cultivated the unique capacity of the "commixture" of image and narrative for telling the double-stranded tale of his father's story and of his own recording of it. Written over a 13-year period between 1978 and 1991, the result is a narrative hybrid echoing with the ambient noise and issues surrounding its telling. It is a continuous narrative rife with the discontinuities of its reception and production, the absolutely authentic voice of Spiegelman's father counterposed to the fabular images of cartoon animals.

The voices of both survivors and the next generation can similarly be heard and seen in dozens of theatrical performances of Holocaust drama staged during and after the war. From the productions of Brundibar and The Emperor of Atlantis in Theresienstadt, which allegorically portrayed the inmates' relationship to their captors, to Broadway extravaganzas like The Diary of Anne Frank, dramatic renderings of the Holocaust shape and transform historical memory and the understanding of events according to the times, places, and cultural contexts surrounding their performances. Given the theater's traditional role as a public stage for contemporary political and social commentary, the searing and often controversial critiques and satires of governments, bystanders, the Church, perpetrators, and even the victims themselves in plays like Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, Peter Weiss's The Investigation, Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy, Joshua Sobol's Ghetto, and Martin Sherman's Bent, among dozens of other works, cannot be surprising. In many cases theatrical representations of the Holocaust bring into the public eye issues, characters, and moral dilemmas that seem

to emanate as much from the preoccupations of contemporary audiences and playwrights as from the events themselves. For unlike other literary media, dramatic representations of the Holocaust on the stage necessarily bring ideas, people, and history to life in the contemporary moment, animated and conditioned as much by the present as by the past.

In his now famous admonition against "poetry after Auschwitz," the Frankfurt School critic Theodor W. Adorno suggested that not only is poetry after Auschwitz barbaric but that it may be immoral to derive the slightest bit of aesthetic pleasure from the suffering of Holocaust victims. Although after he read Paul Celan's masterpiece "Todesfugue" ("Death Fugue"), Adorno later retracted his dictum against such poetry, critical questions over the poetic appropriation of Holocaust imagery persist. To what extent do lineation, rhyme, and meter, for example, distract from and domesticate the brutal facts of the Holocaust? Or to what extent can the aesthetic qualities of poetry and figurative language actually reveal truths—both historical and personal—unavailable to documentary narrative? Through the verse of Celan, Leonie (Nelly) Sachs, Jacob Glatstein, Abraham Sutzkever, Yitzhak Katzenelson, and Dan Pagis, among many others, readers glean insight into both the Holocaust and its devastating effect on the poet's inner life, a kind of knowledge that falls between public and private memory, between communal and personal history.

Had Adorno been aware of the poets writing in Yiddish in the ghettos and concentration camps, he might never have issued his proscription against poetry after Auschwitz. For in poems like Katzenelson's "The Song of the Murdered Jewish People," composed largely in Vittel, a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz, or in Sutzkever's shattering responses to the deaths of his mother and child in the Vilna ghetto, there is no redemption, no consoling beauty to be found. In both cases the poets' Yiddish allows them to invoke biblical precedents, although always for their inadequacy. The language allows the poets to bring their furious debate with God over the meaning of events down to the poet's level, eye to eye, as Glatstein did in poems such as "Dead Men Don't Praise God," "Without Jews," and "My Brother Refugee," written in the United States during the war.

Widely regarded as the single greatest postwar poem in the German language, Celan's "Todesfugue" continues to haunt readers with the imagery and sounds of events irreconcilable to life, unassimilable to memory, and drawn elliptically from the death camps. Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz in 1920, Celan published the poem first in a Romanian translation (as "Death Tango") in 1947 and prefaced it with a note suggesting that the poem was "built on the evocation of a real fact [that] the condemned were forced to sing nostalgic songs while others dug graves." Its opening lines are repeated in a mind-staggering refrain:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink

Within 10 years of the publication of the original German version in 1948, the poem had become a national obsession. Committed to memory by schoolchildren, recited endlessly on the radio, reprinted in the mass media, and dissected constantly by critical foes and friends, the poem assumed a life of its own in the former land of the murderers.

Sachs, the other great German-language poet of the Holocaust, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 (shared with S.Y. Agnon) at least partly for her collection of Holocaust poetry O the Chimneys (1967). Born in 1891 in Berlin to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family, Sachs escaped in 1940 to Sweden, where she spent the rest of her life. Unlike Celan, with his elliptical allusions to images of the concentration camps and his implied challenge to a religious understanding of the Holocaust, Sachs attempted to embed the literal fragments of destruction in biblical contexts, drawing as well on the Zohar and its cabalistic images of exile. Her poem "O the Chimneys" is thus prefaced by a citation from Job 19:26: "And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." The poem itself begins,

O the chimneys
On the ingeniously devised habitations of death
When Israel's body drifted as smoke
Through the air—
Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,
A star that turned black
Or was it a ray of sun?

Other poems, such as "Chorus of the Rescued," meditate on the survivors' difficulty in reentering a normal world:

Lest the song of a bird,
or a pail being filled at the well,
Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again
and carry us away—

In addition to giving a voice to the survivors' return to life, poetry can also articulate the terrible void left in the wake of the victims. "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car," a poem written in Hebrew by the Israeli poet Pagis, also born in Czernowitz, is regarded by many as the purest precipitate of silence in poetry:

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

Perhaps only in poetry can silence be given simultaneous voice and void, can such loss remain so deeply felt and yet unredeemed.

Critical approaches to Holocaust literature have also evolved over the years since the end of the war. Early commentators like A. Alvarez questioned the traditional critic's role as arbiter of good and bad literature or even as a definer of a Holocaust literary canon, which would necessarily exclude too many voices needing to be heard. Others, like Lawrence Langer in his pathbreaking study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1976), raised Adorno's early dictum against Holocaust literature only to show how such literature was necessary. Like other early critics of the literature, Langer concentrated on formulating what he called an "aesthetics of atrocity." Through a series of close readings of writers as diverse as Anthony Hecht, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprun, Jerzy Kosinski, Jakov Lind, Ladislav Fuks, and Andre Schwarz-Bart, among others, Langer offered keen insights into how writers sought to express the inexpressible.

In 1980 Alvin Rosenfeld and Sidra Ezrahi offered sustained close readings of still further works in two new critical studies, in which they also reflected on the "problematics of Holocaust literature" as well as on the ethical and literary implications of appropriating the Holocaust through metaphor. In two studies four years later, David Roskies and Alan Mintz located literary responses to the Holocaust in the longer continuum of Jewish responses to catastrophe over the ages, beginning with biblical responses to the destruction of the Temple (as in Lamentations), continuing through the Hebrew chronicles of the Crusader massacres, and including the early twentieth-century pogrom poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Moshe Leyb Halpern, among others. By restoring Yiddish and Hebrew literary responses to the Holocaust to the longer Jewish cultural and religious tradition of which they are necessarily a part, critics like Roskies and Mintz showed how Jewish writers simultaneously invoke and challenge the tradition, relying upon it and expanding it with their own new responses to destruction.

Yet another generation of critics, including Sara Horowitz and the present author, continues to build on this work, to ask not whether such destruction can be represented but how it has been represented—for better or worse and toward what kinds of ends, meanings, and historical interpretations. Rather than weighing "authentic" against "inauthentic" responses, these later critics tend to locate literary responses to the Holocaust within the national communities spawning them and to compare the literary with other kinds of memorial media. In this view neither the Holocaust nor its literature can be reduced to anything approaching an essential truth, work, or canon. This does not mean that there are no ways to judge and evaluate Holocaust literature. But how readers interpret and evaluate this literature, and to what ends, is now also a part of Holocaust literary criticism.