Term Paper on "Holocaust Literature"

Term Paper 4 pages (1355 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Holocaust Studies

The definition of the word holocaust is a destroying and blighting fire. The word is not specifically a Jewish phrase. It refers to the destruction of something, including an entire, people by a great and overwhelming force, almost a force of nature. The non-Jewish nature of the term holocaust means that the word, also meaning total destruction, can be attributed other acts of genocide. People can also apply the word holocaust to the death of Cambodian nationals during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s Far East, and the genocide of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century at the hands of Turks. The word holocaust could even be applied to a great forest fire, a fire that was total in its destruction of a particular territory, and not tied to racial hatred, or even to human hands at all.

Is the Holocaust a quintessentially Jewish experience of eradication and cultural death? The Hebrew word Shoah gives a more Jewish context to the experience of the death camps. It suggests that Shoah was not simply eradication, but the cumulating act of centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was the bringing of Jews to the brink of destruction, and Shoah was something that had its roots in something deeper than a mere localized ethnic conflict and attempted eradication. It was the result of a cultural wrongness at the heart of European Christianity. Shoah means a catastrophic upheaval and after the Holocaust nothing could be the same -- much of past Jewish cultural legacy was lost or reconfigured because of the death camp's casualty toll.

Shoah locates the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish experience perpetuated by anti-Semitic gentiles, while the idea of Holocaust means that anyone can be either a victim or a perpetuator of genocide or Holocaust. Shoah means that the Holocaust in Europe was the catastrophic, history-altering event, while Holocaust means it was one of many acts of hatred against persecuted peoples. In contrast, Hurban has a more positive, but still Hebrew connotation for what transpired -- it means catastrophe in the Jews' own language, thus preserving the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust, but by calling it a catastrophe it implies, unlike Shoah's meaning of destruction, that rather than an eradication the events were a terrible things but not necessarily the defining moment of Jewish history -- Jewish history did not end at Shoah, rather it remains a living thing.

Question

Elie Wiesel's Night is a memoir that begins with tragedy, portraying the young boy and his father leaving their ghetto. The narrative, such as when Wiesel sees his mother for the last time, is filled with foreshadowing and doom of what will to come, as it is told from the perspective of a first person narrator looking back in retrospect. In contrast, Kaplan's Diary evolves from moment to moment, depriving it of some of the tragic grandeur of Wiesel. Wiesel recollects every moment with his father as if it will be the last -- until it is the last good-bye. Kaplan's uncertainty of survival gives his work it life-sustaining suspense that is exhilarating as well as sad. Levi's Survival in Auschwitz is also a retrospective narrative, although of a far angrier tone than Wiesel's childhood perspective. Levi narrates with the voice of an adult and with a more adult experience than Wiesel. Yet Levi is an adult who knows tragically and hopefully like Weisel who will live and die. Kaplan's narrative, although the reader knows what will happen has an immediacy of lived history which is valuable regarding an event so often reconstructed, even though events are not given a symbolic significance that only retrospective can endow.

Question

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's tale is told from a woman who is three times oppressed, as a Jewish woman hated by her fellow Poles, as an Eastern European woman often ostracized by her fellow Jewish prisoners, and lastly as a woman, of a gender considered powerless by all. Thus, True Tales from a Grotesque Land: Auschwitz is shaped by all of these authorial identities… READ MORE

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