Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge: 2005.
Article Ref.
- Patterson, David. “Shofar.” Shofar, vol. 25, no. 2, 2007, pp. 208–210. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42944275.
- Benchouiha, Lucie. “The Modern Language Review.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 101, no. 2, 2006, pp. 509–510. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20466806.
Sicher’s primary concern is with the literary contexts of the Holocaust novel as a genre unto itself….with the genre of the Holocaust novel as specifically distinct from Holocaust testimony or historical record.
Sicher examines works by: Holocaust survivors, classic writers including authors from Israel, Germany and Austria and France and other countries. He then focuses a chapter on American Post – Holocaust novels written by writers using just their imaginations to write what they do. A next chapter examines “Holocaust fictions or Fictional Holocausts” – in which he examines the tension between history and fiction. Then there is a chapter on the Second Generation and introduces novels that cut across national boundaries. He explores the question of where and how the second generation might lead a third generation of Holocaust novelists. The final chapter is on Postmodern Holocausts. (Patterson, P.209-210)
after considering what the term postmodern means when applied to the Holocaust novel he takes a detailed look at several postmodern Holocaust novelists* Among these are Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Emily Prager, Anne Michaels, Raymond Federman, Ian McEwen and others. (Patterson, P.210)
Sicher addresses the Novel – as story-telling, enabling the imaginative empathy necessary to understand the Holocaust as a real event in recent history in the heart of Western civilization. She examines the writings of survivors – as the first ‘constitution’ of Holocaust literature. Sicher goes on to examine second generation writers as expressing their desire to voice their untold stories of the Holocaust and to voice their own identity and writing themselves into history - while fulfilling their generational responsibility to transmit memory…..
He discusses at length ‘collective identity of catastrophe’…
Page 55-63. She discusses Wiesel’s memoire as being written “within Jewish tradition and within a theology with quite different attitudes towards suffering. We learn of the incredulity of Sighet Jews – and their self-delusion …what Wiesel says about his faith, and a description of “Night”
Page 71 – Description of Applefeld – Badenheim 1939.
Page 79. Jersy Kosinski – the Painted Bird….
Page 89. Sicher discusses the Jewish American Post- holocaust novel…witnessing through the imagination.
Page 133-138. The Aftermath – The Second Generation – Sicher speaks of how the parents’ Holocaust memory was of shame and buried very deep within them – and an inability to complete mourning work for Holocaust dead. Leaving many children of survivors with an enormous burden of memory – many having been named for a dead sibling etc.. The parent survivors of the Holocaust succeeded in passing on suppressed Holocaust trauma – to a whole generation who grew up without grandparents –
Page 148 156. Discusses a variety of Second Generation authors – such as:
David Grossman “See Under Love”…he and other have an acute sense that the wounds of history are hereditary and that Israeli identity is powerfully linked to Jewish calamity. Also “The Grammar of Intimate Beikng.” (p. 155)
P. 156. Nava Semel “The Glass Hat”
Page 157. Henri Raczmow “La Memoire Trouee.”..meaning a memory of a blank – a memory of not remembering; a turning in the void of an erased cultural identity…
Page 163. Discussion of Seconf Generation Jews in France… Writers:
And Dutch Jewish children in Holland… Who all had to deal with SILENCE…
Patrick Mondiano, Myriam Anissimov …all about exorcising guilt…
Page 168. Discusses displacement and ‘distancion’…..imagining the past from the future…
Page 171.The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event in European and Jewish history of such proportions that some have seen the post Holocaust generation of sharing common problems of faith and identity in the confrontation with an amoral, post-apocalyptic world that has lost its Humanity.
In discussing second and third generation responses to the Holocaust, Sicher notes that “these next generations responses have grown to international proportion – They do however differ greatly from country to country – shaped by the vicissitudes and variations of official discourse on the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
So what can we say about the second generation children of Holocaust Survivors having? They share a common rage at the cataclysmic violence that has befell their families...
Page 172. The unprocessable consciousness of the parents’ wounded psyches was felt as an untouchable bodily injury, while the recent memories of the Holocaust emerged in unspoken fears, night time screams, and sudden tears, along with an intensity mixed with sadness and cynicism - the shared language of the survivor community expressing broken, emotionally charged speech calculated by painful silence. 57.
Page 173. Sicher discusses second generation Holocaust novels in the context of secondary witnessing, and although they are not based on first-hand experience, they may use testimony in the recovery of personal and family history. Like other Holocaust novels, they are works in the imagination mediated by popular culture and the shaping of memory. The role of the second generation as a carrier of memory between the victims and the Next Generation nevertheless places them in the unique position, but it is not clear whether they will pass on the crippling traumas they have inherited or whether as some observers believe, the generation is creating a new identity that may be closer to the survivors' generation then to their parents. Dan Bar-On has placed the children of survivors in a unique position between the survivors and their grandchildren, not too late for Testimony to be spoken to recover, not too early for it to be passed on to the grandchildren; much traumatic material that was silenced or repressed is thus worked through in transmission to the 3rd Generation. 62
Page 174. Sicher discusses: " The Holocaust has become a post-modern sign of Loss which surrogates for authentic Judaism in the work of contemporary writers seeking some sense in the coalescing forms of multiculturalism and cross-ethnic matches tensions. The Holocaust has become a sign of Postmodernism itself."
Page 175. Sisher's Final Chapter -Old Post apocalypse; postmodernist Holocaust..
Page 176 Sicher discusses Adorno’s declaration that it was barbarous to write poetry after the Holocaust…
Page 175-176 Sicher reminds us that:
Theodore Adorno and Max torque and Horkheimer (in Dialectic of the Enlightenment), reconstructed the Enlightenment as a destructive program for the disenchantments of the world that reduced life to a method of calculation. The rational project of scientific progress relied on an instrumental policy of industrial efficiency and administrative planning, and it led to factories of death. Auschwitz was a caesura of Western Society, a turning point in conceptual as well as chronological parameters of post-modernity, which marked the point when Western society was revealed in the state of Adorno's total reification.
The Holocaust is often spoken of as a paradigmatic catastrophe, a seismic event that exceeds all boundaries of the imagination and that defines measurement of for understanding. It has become the supreme postmodern event. ...
Auschwitz is also the paradigm of the unrepresentable. It offers a case study of the breakdown of history and paradoxically represents the failure of representation, indeed the failure of language itself. Language is important to describe the horror, because the Nazis as George Steiner reminds us, did so much to incapacitate language by code-words and innocuous camouflage of the most sinister intentions; no wonder that Nelly Sachs once complained that ‘there were words she could not use.’
Page 178. Refers to the Banality of evil – Hannah Arendt.
Page 177-178. Sicher discusses America and Hitler, looking at how “Hitler could be a legitimate subject for comic treatment and this Cantor suggests is troubling because Americans liberal democracy offers a wide choice of values that are too often undifferentiated valueless. implicit then, is an ironic critique of blindness to the evil of Nazism and its post historical acceptance of all styles and views…but he was a represent something that continues to meet the demand, a charismatic cult figure that Masters the crowds fear of death and Unites it in atavistic rites.”
Page 179. Perhaps Auschwitz explains post modernity?
Page 180. In order to judge the perpetrators who often claimed they were only following orders, as morally culpable they need to be Imagined as having agency, and this requires contemplating the direct result leading from their actions, separating cause and effect in a chronological chain that filters out guilt. Amnesia cannot protect the soul deprived of will when traveling backward in time, inexorably, to the nature of the offense.
Page 184. Sicher discusses “Fugitive Pieces” by Anne Michaels… sums up the dilemma for th contemporary writer…
Page 192-197. “History Memory and the failure of Mimeses” – McEwen, Seybald (Austerlitz,) George Steiner on “Language and Truth.”
Page 194-195. Sicher examines the novels of two German authors: W.G. Seybold and Jack Austerlitz. The former wrote novels of mourning and exile and the latter wrote from his personal experience of being a Kinder transport child who grew up the only child of childless Christians in a Welch village. He wrote of the extreme difficulties of ‘constructing a memory strong enough to hold an identity that has been erased in the Holocaust.
Page 195 196. Sicher relates stories of grandchildren research the pasts of their Waffen SS grandparents and the effects of that historical research on succeeding German generations. She brings up the post-war inability of Germans to work through the post-war guilt of the Holocaust.
Page 201. Berel Lang “Holocaust representation: Art within the limits of history and ethics.” Saul Friedlander – Representation of the Holocaust in historical writing.
