Sven-Erik Rose
Sven-Erik Rose is associate professor of German, University of California, Davis.
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Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos is a study of literary texts written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos. It illustrates the extent to which we cannot take for granted that any of the literary works studied in this book have survived and come down to us. The fate of so much Holocaust-era writing (of all types) was to be destroyed, and for the most part we have no way of knowing what was lost along with the very lives of authors. The majority of the texts discussed in this book were buried in biscuit tins or milk cans in the Warsaw ghetto in the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the massive archival project led by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum with the aim of documenting Jewish life in Poland under German occupation and, especially, in the Warsaw ghetto as thoroughly and from as many different perspectives as possible.
This book shows that it is misguided to argue that we should privilege the least literary modes of discourse as somehow closer to the brute reality of the catastrophic events. Such historiographical approaches presuppose a neat distinction between reality, on the one hand, and the vagaries of literature, on the other, that is simply not tenable. The sheer prevalence of literary writing—and, to be sure, of reading literature—among those persecuted in the Holocaust powerfully testifies to how intricately literature was woven into the catastrophic and traumatic fabric of their experience of the Shoah. Whether we look to canonical works of Holocaust literature or to writings by little-known authors, we find that literature was not extraneous or even secondary to how victims experienced the Holocaust but was one of the key frameworks with which they thought through their terrible and ever-changing reality.
This book demonstrates the ways that the much-repeated adage by Adorno about writing poetry after Auschwitz has contributed to the neglect of poetry written during the Holocaust and failed to recognize how poetry and other literary genres were centrally concerned with the question of what it meant to narrate the catastrophic realities of ghetto life into received literary forms. This is both more specific than Adorno’s (widely misread) warning and more attentive to what those actually undergoing these atrocities thought on these matters. Beyond this central insight, the book also demonstrates that the distinction between documentary and literary writing mobilized by those seeking primary material by eyewitnesses to substantiate the historical record has failed to adequately recognize how much literature was built into the everyday reality of ghetto life; literature is no esthetic offshoot of reality but intricately tied up with this reality, both in the reading and writing habits of starving inhabitants and in the ways that literature shaped the perception and reception of these realities.
Sven-Erik Rose is associate professor of German, University of California, Davis.
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