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Breaking the Silences: Jewish-American Women Writing the Holocaust
Ist Teil von
The Yearbook of English studies, 2001-01, Vol.31, p.24-38
Ort / Verlag
Modern Humanities Research Association
Erscheinungsjahr
2001
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article focuses on a detailed reading of three short stories from the 1980s (Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl', Rebecca Goldstein's 'The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish', and Lesléa Newman's 'A Letter to Harvey Milk'), and argues that the recent profusion of short fiction by American-Jewish women, much of it dealing with the Holocaust, represents a breaking of two silences: the taboo imposed on American-Jewish women writers by the canonical dominance of male figures such as Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, and the absence in their fiction of the Holocaust. It suggests that there is in these short stories an ambivalent aesthetic of Holocaust fiction at work: that is to say, a desire to give a voice to wartime Jewish suffering, and the fear that to do so will inevitably involve aestheticizing, and therefore profaning, that suffering. This manifests itself in these stories in an unresolved tension between speech and silence.