This review article discusses how Hannah Pollin-Galay’s Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish represents a fascinating study of how not only people, but also languages get affected by mass violence and can function as witnesses and memory repositories of genocidal conditions. As such, the book offers new ways to understand the long-lasting and nuanced impact of the Holocaust on individuals, languages, cultures, and societies.
This review article discusses Judith Hughes’s 2022 monograph, The Perversion of Holocaust Memory: Writing and Rewriting the Past after 1989, which builds on her two previous analyses of Holocaust understanding and representation: The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History (2015) and Witnessing the Holocaust: Six Literary Testimonies (2018). The review demonstrates that Hughes’s book provides a polemical and sophisticated study of how Holocaust remembrance has been politicized and distorted in modern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Prompted by what the author sees as distressing ‘recent efforts to minimize the Holocaust and to play down the anti-Semitism that lay at its roots’, the book provides a powerful, normative argument about the necessity of confronting national complicity in the genocide.
Following Giorgio Agamben's claim from Remnants of Auschwitz that witnesses' testimony of horrors 'contained [...] an essential lacuna' of something 'impossible to bear witness to', my article argues that artists' books dedicated to the Holocaust try to fill that lacuna through multimedial encounters. I engage with Emanuel Levinas' phenomenology of responsibility to examine first-person testimonies in Miklos Adler's Beyond Words: A Holocaust History (1946), Walter Feldman's Lager Lieder (1991) and Tatana Kellner's works 71125 and B-11226 (1992). I analyze kinetics, the tactile and visual experience that transform Jacques Fournier's 6 avril 1944 (1999) into a memorial for the 44 children deported to Auschwitz from Izieu. Working with Lyotard's diff & eacute;rend, I also examine artists' books as multi-layered outcomes of the artists' efforts to recover collective and individual traumatic memories of the Holocaust, which take readers through journeys of unimaginable suffering, tremendous loss and inconceivable survival.
Feng Li's academic interview with Kathy Kacer, a renowned Canadian author of Holocaust literature for young readers, addresses issues such as cross-generation memories and representations of the Holocaust, the psychological endurance of children and young adults in reading Holocaust scenarios and innovation in narrative techniques when writing Holocaust literature for young readers. Kacer argues that she is treading a careful line of being true to Holocaust history but also ensuring that her young readers will not be traumatized. She also emphasizes that stories are the world's memories and that we should capture as many voices as we can while survivors are still there, to share their stories and, even when they are gone, continue writing stories that inform history with accuracy and sensitivity, because without historical stories, we will lose even more of our humanity.
Concomitant with the attempts to broaden the meaning of the prohibition against genocide (in ways that can be damaging both to the short term and long-term interests of the prohibition itself) there has been a seemingly opposite move to narrow the meaning and impact of the Holocaust itself. The latter has particularly been the case when engaging in memorialization efforts of other genocides, driven by the desire to remove the so-called Holocaust trope (whereby the Holocaust is deemed a unique and singular historical event). The contention in this article is that memory plays a role that affords unique forms of Holocaust memorialization without falling into the socalled Holocaust trope. This article considers the notion of memory as understood by Jews in their practice and approach to memory. In many ways, the approach to memory by Jews reflects the understanding of memory by indigenous groups as well, an important aspect in memory protection (particularly as reflected in the cultural heritage protection context). By way of contrast, and as a means of further identifying the approach to memory protection, the understanding of memory differs from the likes of collective memory within for example the transitional justice framework. The approach to memory is not meant to turn the Holocaust into a singular event that disallows comparison and contrast with other genocidal occurrences. Rather, the article is seeking to find the ways and means of incorporating approaches to memory that better reflect and capture the voices of those to whom Holocaust memorialization is paramount.
