Work
Further information: Auschwitz and AfterWhile little-known by most readers, within the Holocaust-literature community Delbo is widely respected and her work is beginning to be assigned as part of most college-level courses on the subject.
This relative obscurity is partly due to her work only recently having appeared in English translation; also because the Holocaust-literature canon has tended to focus on writers such as Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel who have been in print for far longer.
But it is her technique that has been the biggest hurdle to overcome. Like Tadeusz Borowski, another non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for resistance activities, she chose a less comfortable way of relating her experience than the more straightforward narratives of Levi and Wiesel.
Her guiding principle was, as she regularly described it, Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir, or roughly translated when it occurs as a refrain in her work, "Try to look. Just try and see."
Delbo greatly influenced the work of Cynthia Haft who is originally from Brooklyn, New York, but currently lives in Jerusalem. Haft met Delbo in New York while Haft was in her teens and their friendship, first one of one of mentor and student, grew and lasted throughout Delbo's life. In addition to translating some of Delbo's works, Haft introduced Lamont to Delbo while Haft was writing her Ph.D. dissertation at the City University of New York and Lamont was one of Haft's readers. Delbo's work has been very influential already for a number of other scholars in addition to Haft and Lamot, such as Lawrence L. Langer, Nicole Thatcher, Geoffrey Hartman, Marlene Heinemann, Robert Skloot, Kali Tal, Erin Mae Clark, Joan M. Ringelheim, Debarati Sanyal, and many others. Feminists are showing an increasing interest in her work, though Delbo did not identify herself as a feminist.
Read more about this topic: Charlotte Delbo
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)