Homeschooled

The Holocaust has been haunting the world persistently since the Second World War. Its traumatic, violent nature lives on by manifesting itself in the lives, memories and recounts of its survivors, as well as in present literary discourse and fiction. Throughout the decades, academics and writers have come to a certain agreement that Holocaust representation is ironically a problematic act of justice. In a new era, Holocaust survivors and victims alike still face the same oppression. While representing and lending a voice to them, Holocaust authors conflate the artistic with the authentic personal experience, and this is criticized to be highly ineffective and fruitless. This is evident in scores of Holocaust films like Life is Beautiful (1997), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) and Son of Saul (2015), reinforcing the same Jewish identity as forever fleeing and vulnerable, established since The Exodus of the Semitic Israelites.


Why then, is seeking for justice futile? According to Berel Lang in his hallmark Holocaust essay Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History, he argues that “history can never be fully undone or overcome” (18). Attempts at interpreting and explaining historical events like the Holocaust will fail, with the Holocaust being “unspeakable” (73). Lang explains this to be unfathomable precisely due to the historical nature of the Holocaust; fictional works cannot “fully account” for the mass suffering of Holocaust victims (76). They end up producing “incomprehensible linguistic utterances”, devoid of meaning and accuracy. However, Lang optimistically suggests that the Holocaust “is speakable … [as much] as other historically complex and morally charged events” (72). The distinctiveness of the Holocaust allows one to comprehend it with enhanced clarity, unlike what is commonly thought to be the opposite, and approach it with the means of thematic “judgement” of trauma (85). Cathy Caruth offers a more scoped psychoanalysis of history and memory, where trauma is the “unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (8). While Lang promotes a focused study of the Holocaust in relation to its unique time-period, Caruth claims that trauma should largely be viewed as the “ongoing experience of having survived [the Holocaust]” (7). Holocaust justice is now defined as a complex and precarious subject. The destruction and mortality create a distinct new reality in which Holocaust victims live on with the painful experience of death and oppression, and fictional authors must carefully navigate this space if they are to succeed with their work.
Trauma has emerged as a ubiquitous and crucial feature of post-Holocaust literature. To define it, Caruth introduces Sigmund Freud’s ideas, with trauma as a memory of something that has been “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again” (4). Meaning can only be established in the act of traumatic remembering, since the traumatic memory is “not known in the first instance” (4), but instead left as an unclaimed experience that can only be addressed through “re-opening the [psychological] wound”, as Lang expands on the argument (84). This wound is not erased; Lang maintains that it must be “brought into the open, moved to speak … insofar as that is possible at all”, contrary to suppressing and trying to forget it (82). It is from the intentional exposure of grief and shock that justice can be done, or in other words trauma can be resolved. The “claim of unspeakability and the judgement of silence” must be resisted and broken, and with this Lang optimistically opens the floor to possibilities in successful Holocaust representation (84). Such a claim actively encourages representation, even as it is argued that silence “erases the past … as if [it] had not occurred” (84). As Caruth writes, stirring up the uneasy memories constitutes a new “history [that] can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence”, such that this “latency” suggests that the present is the optimum opportunity for grasping meaning (18). Accuracy and relevance are now possible to be attained, and the portrayal of mortality and trauma, this act of breaking the silence and speaking the taboo, implies that the representation of the Holocaust victims is an ultimately fair one. Recognizing the power structures, and of the reality of the oppressed victims, is the foundational step in bridging the gap between assumptions and the repressed reality. Authors must accept the burden of collective memory, and work to sustain it. Other studies question the suitability of representation. David Roskies, when reviewing several Holocaust critics, mentioned the Yiddish critic Yechiel Szeintuch’s adamance that “a writer automatically changes his perspective as soon as a given stimulus is removed”, and that their current post-Holocaust, developed environments pervade their opinions and writing (211). Sidra Ezrahi disagrees with this pessimistic, extreme view, and instead she posits that “the force of [Holocaust authors’] shared experience is so great, that it lays a stronger claim on their artistic expression” than their cultural allegiances (212). Perceptions that are discolored by a new reality may not have such adverse misleading effects after all, “concentrationary realism”, as Ezrahi suggests, is still as effective when relying on facts conflated with imagination in order to narrate a reality, which in turn is inherently artificial as well since reality cannot be represented in works of fiction, as earlier suggested by Lang. There seems to be a general agreement with the possibility of an effective Holocaust work of representative fiction, but there is a lack of discussion on effective aesthetic techniques that can be used.


Narratology as a source for representation is a popular area of discussion amongst current critics. Take Leona Toker for example, in her article Playgrounds, she explores the creative use of uncanny narrative perspectives to “[expand] classical narratology to accommodate ‘unnatural narratives’” (489), and in doing so “provide a sense of insight” into narratives like those of the Holocaust (491). Specifically, what this new approach does is revealed by Brian Richardson to be against “mimetic reductionism”, and challenges assumptions that all narratives must be relatable and based on our “cognitive parameters” (115). This seems to fit in snugly with Holocaust literature, and novel narrative techniques may be effective, instead of trivializing the Holocaust with a typical mimetic, realist work of fiction. Tying this in with Lang, the uniqueness of the Holocaust dictates that there must similarly be a distinct form of narrativization or representation, for Holocaust justice to be truly done.