Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Ref. article:
- Kahn, Lothar. “World Literature Today.” World Literature Today, vol. 55, no. 2, 1981, pp. 378–378. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40136272.
In an introduction rich in insight on the Holocaust and art, the special language of L’univers concentrationnaire (including "Nazi-Deutsch") and speculation about the reasons for the steadily mounting collection of memoir literature, Ezrahi has set the tone for the chapters that follow. She examines first the witness/survivor literature, "Concentrationary Realism," the "Landscape of Death" and "Literature for Survival." She next delves into the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy, as "The Legacy of Lamentations" and "The Covenantal Context." Her best chapter may well be "The Holocaust Mythologized," in which the author at least hints at the danger of taking the atrocities out of the realm of history. The book concludes with a view of the Holocaust in American literature, perhaps her least original chapter. The author has brilliantly elucidated the relationship between art and those disruptions in historical continuity, moral vision and just plain reality that the Holocaust symbolized. By her deep analysis of the various genres of atrocity literature as they developed over the years, she has underscored the gulf between the deeds and the limitations of the Word to reflect them accurately.
