Holocaust Literature - Literature

Literature

Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski (see his semi-autobiographical novel, The Painted Bird), Imre Kertész, Jean Améry, Edgar Hilsenrath, Anne Frank, Boris Pahor, Aharon Appelfeld (and his satirical novel Badenheim 1939, for instance) and Gizelle Hersh, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from Sylvia Plath to Saul Bellow addressing it in their works.

The title character of American author's William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, published in 1979, is a former inmate of Auschwitz who tells the story of her Holocaust experience to the narrator over the course of the novel. It was commercially successful and won the National Book Award for fiction in 1980.

In 1991, Art Spiegelman completed the second and final installment of his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus. Through text and illustration, the autobiography retraces his father's steps through the Holocaust along with the residual effects of those events a generation later.

Also, in 1991, Martin Amis's novel, Time's Arrow was published. This book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, details the life of a Nazi doctor, but is told in reverse chronological order, in a narrative that almost seems to cleanse the doctor of his sins that the doctor has committed, and return to a time before the horrific acts of pure evil that preceded the Nazi regime.

White Wolf, Inc. put out Charnal Houses of Europe: The Shoah in 1997 under its adult Black Dog Game Factory label. It is a carefully researched, respectful, and horrifically detailed supplement on the ghosts of the victims of the Holocaust for the Wraith: The Oblivion

Pinaki Roy's "The Shrieks of Silence: Reading Transnational Miseries in Select Holocaust Novels", published in The Atlantic Critical Review Quarterly ( Vol. 6, No. 4, October–December 2007, ISBN 978-81-269-0936-0, pp. 120–34) offers a comparative study of the different Holocaust novels written in or translated into English. In his "Against Barbarism: A Very Brief Survey of Holocaust Poetry", published in Labyrinth: An International Referred Journal of Postmodern Studies (Vol. 3, No. 4, October 2012, pp. 52–60, I.S.S.N. 0976-0814), Pinaki Roy rereads different Holocaust victims' poems translated into English for the elements of suffering and protestations ingrained in them.

Richard Zimler's The Warsaw Anagrams takes place in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940-41 and is narrated by an ibbur (ghost). Named 2010 Book of the Year in Portugal, where Zimler has lived since 1990, the novel was described in the San Francisco Chronicle in August 2011 as follows: "Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature."

Key works in other languages include Ukrainian Anatoly Kuznetsov's novel about the Babi Yar massacre and Polish Tadeusz Borowski's books "This way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" and "We were in Auschwitz".

"Stalags" were pocket books that became popular in Israel and whose stories involved lusty female SS officers sexually abusing Nazi camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.

Some alternate history fiction set in scenarios where Nazi Germany wins World War II, includes the Holocaust happening in countries where it did not happen in reality. And, the effects of a slight turn of historic events on other nations is imagined in The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth where an alleged Nazi sympathizer—Charles A. Lindbergh—defeats FDR for the Presidency in the United States in 1940.

The effect of the Holocaust on Jews living in other countries is also seen in The Museum Guard by Howard Norman, which is set in Nova Scotia in 1938 and in which a young half-Jewish woman becomes so obsessed and disturbed with a painting of a "Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam", that she is resolved to go to Amsterdam and "reunite" with the painter, despite all the horrific events occurring in Europe at the time and the consequences that may result.

A large body of literature has also been established concerning the Nuremburg Trials of 1945-1946, a subject which has been continually written about over the years. (See Nuremberg Trials bibliography).