By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature

by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226233369
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/15/1982
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is professor emerita of comparative literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, and two books in Hebrew.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Alfred Kazin
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Documentation as Art
3. "Concentrationary Realism" and the Landscape of Death
4. Literature of Survival
5. The Holocaust as a Jewish Tragedy 1: The Legacy of Lamentations
6. The Holocaust as a Jewish Tragedy 2: The Covenantal Context
7. The Holocaust Mythologized
8. History Imagined: The Holocaust in American Literature
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index