Intertextuality and Translation in Three Recent French Holocaust Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Translation Analysis ◽  
Sylvie Germain ◽  
Role Translation ◽  
French Texts

This essay highlights the role translation plays in constructing Holocaust memory in fiction. Considering for example references to the work of Primo Levi in French texts, it shows how recent Holocaust novels have recourse to intertexts originally written in another language in order to evoke shared knowledge about the Holocaust. The translation of Holocaust novels therefore poses the problem of translating an intertext that is itself a translation. Analysis of recent novels by Fabrice Humbert, Boualem Sansal, and Sylvie Germain suggests that such translated intertextuality can produce complex and unpredictable reinterpretations. The essay argues that translation and multilingualism are rhetorical strategies used in Holocaust fiction to approach complex questions of identity and unrepresentability.

Grandparents Reveal Their Secrets: A New Holocaust Narrative for the Young ‘Third Generation’ in Israel

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Darr
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Type

Since the 1990s, a new type of Holocaust story has been emerging in Israeli children's literature. This new narrative is directed towards very young children, from preschool to the first years of elementary school, and its official goal is to instil in them an authentic ‘first Holocaust memory’. This essay presents the literary characteristics of this new Holocaust narrative for children and its master narrative. It brings into light a new profile of both writers and readers. The writers were young children during the Holocaust, and first chose to tell their stories from the safe distance of three generations. The readers are their grand-children and their grand-children's peers, who are assigned an essential role as listeners. These generational roles – the roles of a First Generation of writers and of a Third Generation of readers – are intrinsically familial ones. As such, they mark a significant change in the profile of yet another important figure in the Israeli intergenerational Holocaust discourse, the agent of the Holocaust story for children. Due to the new literary initiatives, the task of providing young children with a ‘first Holocaust memory’ is transferred from the educational authority, where it used to reside, to the domestic sphere.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

Fragments of the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
A Site

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.

Regarding the Pain of Women: Questions of Gender and the Arts of Holocaust Memory

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1778-1786 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Young
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
War Photography ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Critical Literature

My Title, a variation on Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, is meant as an homage to sontag and as an extension of her searing critique of war photography and its reflexive objectification of suffering, its conversion of victims into objets d'art. But why, in particular, the pain of women Holocaust victims here? Because we have finally begun to amass a large and profound critical literature on gender and the Holocaust, which, alongside Sontag's work on photography, might help us look at how and why the public gaze of photographers, curators, historians, and museumgoers continues to turn women into objects of memory, idealized casts of perfect suffering and victimization, and even emblems of larger Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

scholarly journals The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner
Keyword(s):  
European Archive ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By partaking in reconsidering what is ‘vital for a shared remembering’ of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union’s political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in European history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar – a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she ‘carries’ a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made inaccessible her family’s past.

scholarly journals Is There the Holocaust without a Film Music? Analyzing a Croatian and a Serbian Film about the Holocaust

2017 ◽  
pp. 181-195
Author(s):  
Renata Jambrešić Kirin
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
The Impact

This article implies that the impact of cinematic fiction on the capability to imagine and comprehend the trauma of the Holocaust is formed at the intersection of aesthetic, moral, social and ideological frames in particular society. Cinema had a special role for the unification of the Holocaust memory since 1990. In the post-Yugoslav cinema two feature films (Lea and Darija, 2011 and When Day Breaks, 2012) represent the cinematic paradigm shift in dealing with the difficult heritage of the Holocaust in Croatia and Serbia following the break of communism. Although they suffer from apolitical approach to historical issues and mitigate the consequences of local collaboration with the Nazis, as well as take the child as „the figure of infantilization” of the Holocaust (Hirsch 2012), their influence on the “postmemory generation” and the pedagogy of trauma in the region is significant and socially relevant.

The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (5) ◽  
pp. 1231-1246
Author(s):  
Michael Rothberg
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Discrete Event ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
First Time

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.

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