Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos
Sven-Erik Rose
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Writing in Nazi ghettos within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary conventions.
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.
This publication has been made possible thanks to the Martin A. Coleman & Ruth Benjamin Coleman '57 Endowment for Holocaust Studies.
“The first scholarly account of the literature written in the ghettos that takes it seriously as literature. The consequences for our understanding of the ghettos as a historical phenomenon, of the lives lived there, and of the way that these lives have been remembered, memorialized, and understood, are profound.” — Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago
“Among the most powerful works of literary criticism I have read in many years. The focus on literary production in the ghettos is both literary criticism/history and Holocaust history, and should be taken seriously in both fields. A must-read.” — Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto
“Sven-Erik Rose has written a work of immense erudition and scholarly acumen. His portrait of literature produced under circumstances horrific or worse is masterful. A fluent, persuasive argument for the importance of he resurrects with rare skill.” — Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University
Purchase from Brandeis University Press
About the Author
Sven-Erik Rose is professor of German and of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought.