...Benjamin Friedlander Trauma theory posits an unrepresentable excess to experience, but because most studies of trauma deal with experiences that are known and named, at least in general terms (for instance, the Holocaust), there is a tendency to treat the limits of representation as objective...

... the success of his project, his last book, The Drowned and the Saved,expresses a great disillusionment about his life's work as a witness to the Holocaust. The change can be traced, first, to his growing doubts about the reliability of witnesses, and second, to the reactions of readers, which made him...

...Tony Kushner It has taken many decades after 1945 for the testimony of Holocaust victims to be taken seriously. This article charts the shift from the marginalization of survivors and the lack of interest in their accounts immediately after the war to more recent developments, whereby they have...

... documents. Historians are slowly coming to agree that survivor accounts are a crucial source of evidence for appreciating the unorthodox and unprecedented moral universe of the Holocaust. Writers as diverse as Charlotte Delbo, Imre Kertész, Arnošt Lustig, and Aharon Appelfeld find ways of stripping...

...Robert N. Kraft Videotaped oral testimony of Holocaust survivors documents the extended (disjointed) memories of individuals who suffered through the industrial cruelty of the Third Reich. This testimony is studied cognitively in an effort to understand memory for atrocity and to characterize...

...Henry Greenspan; Sidney Bolkosky Studies of interviewing suggest that there is a wide gulf between interviewing theory and actual practice. Regarding interviews with Holocaust survivors specifically, there have been no systematic studies of the relationships between theory and practice, nor has...

... the use of such resources with a view to obtain a more complete history of the Holocaust. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2006 Bauer, Yehuda 2001 Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Boder, David P. 1949 I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana...

... such sentiments tend to suppress their expression. Not surprisingly, Holocaust survivors in America who have harbored such sentiments against the Germans and others who persecuted them and murdered their families have tended to be silent about those sentiments rather than incur such disapproval. Yet...

...Thane Rosenbaum A “post-Holocaust novelist” describes the reason for insisting on this category and explains why he thinks the Holocaust itself should not be directly portrayed. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2006 The Audacity of Aesthetics: The Post-Holocaust Novel...

...Susan Rubin Suleiman This essay explores questions about memory and its relation to historical truth, chiefly through an examination of the “Wilkomirski case,”involving a highly acclaimed Holocaust memoir that has now been shown to be a fake. I argue that the categorical distinction between memoir...

... community in the Holocaust and the multilingual composition of Yiddish as a fusion language that crosses lexicons and alphabets. By invoking or embedding Yiddish in non-Yiddish writing, whether in its original Hebrew letters or in transliteration, authors emphasize the characters' and the reader's encounter...

...Ernst van Alphen In discussions of second- and third-generation Holocaust literature and testimony, it is an accepted idea that the trauma of Holocaust survivors is often transmitted from the first to the second and later generations. This article analyzes the “problems” of survivors' children...

...Annette Wieviorka This essay traces transformations in the figure of the witness from the period of the ghettos to the present, focusing on the meaning and contexts of the predominant forms of testimony during the Holocaust and since. Efforts to bear witness in diaries, chronicles, and unpublished...

...Patricia Yaeger When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly they behave. We may also miss the odd ways a testimony's figures of speech invite readers or listeners to misbehave: to try too hard to recover a sacred sense of witnessing. How do ordinary techniques of literary...

...Aleida Assmann The essay focuses on the relationship between memory and history, which has changed in many ways under the impact of the Holocaust. Memory that had been discarded by historians as an unreliable and distorting source came to be acknowledged as an important factor in the reconstruction...

...Dalia Ofer The essay addresses the issues of health and medicine in the ghettos of eastern Europe, emphasizing the centrality of oral testimonies and memoirs to historical analysis. It opens with some general remarks on Holocaust testimonies and then moves on to a discussion of medicine...

...Jan T. Gross The article calls for close reading of Holocaust testimonies and reminiscences. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2006 Agamben, Giorgio 1999 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books). Akhmatova, Anna 1988 Poems (Moscow...

... since the late 1990s to create a memory boom, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of testimonies. The essay questions whether trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understanding the belated appearance of these memories...

... of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function...

... of modern Yiddish literature into performance art, so as to capture and commemorate the language. The representation of speech in modern Yiddish writing was not ethnography but the replacement of the old with a new orality, and it happened in five phases. By the final, post-Holocaust phase, the vocal strain...