By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature

Description

The creative literature that evolved from the Holocaust constitutes an unprecedented encounter between art and life. Those who wrote about the Holocaust were forced to extend the limits of their imaginations to encompass unspeakably violent extremes of human behavior. The result, as Ezrahi shows in By Words Alone, is a body of literature that transcends national and cultural boundaries and shares a spectrum of attitudes toward the concentration camps and the world beyond, toward the past and the future. Contents Foreword by Alfred Kazin Acknowledgments ONE Introduction TWO Documentation as Art THREE "Concentrationary Realism" and the Landscape of Death FOUR Literature of Survival FIVE The Holocaust as a Jewish Tragedy 1: The Legacy of Lamentations SIX The Holocaust as a Jewish Tragedy 2: The Covenantal Context SEVEN The Holocaust Mythologized EIGHT History Imagined: The Holocaust in American Literature Afterword Notes Bibliography