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Imagining the Holocaust

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Surely there has never been a more gut-wrenching and yet revealing discussion of the nature of human evil than Daniel Schwarz's "Imagining the Holocaust." Mr. Schwarz examines the tragedy not only through the eyes and voices of survivors and the survivors' children, but in the words of novelists in about twenty-five narratives including Wiesel's Night, Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, The Dairy of Anne Frank, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, and Spiegelman's cartoon Maus. But when reading Maus, we cannot laugh! Except perhaps as a nervous reflex to the unmitigated horror which is echoed in the voices of the unspeakable tragedy. For even in an event as traumatic as the Holocaust, Schwarz argues that we need to distinguish between what happened and how we remember what happened. Moreover, how we remember and retell the event. For imagination plays a crucial role both in our acts of memory and the act of telling. Imagination is a gift which enables us to see ourselves as "other." And imaginative language, he shows, invades the gates of the unspeakable and creates historical reality. Likewise, Schwarz demonstrates how his authors use imagination and memory to discover courage and faith in the depths of the soul. Even in the Holocaust's "Heart of Darkness." And so it is with this in mind that I can do no better than wholeheartedly recommend Mr. Schwarz's "Imagining the Holocaust." --W. Pearce Brown Ithaca, New York

Writing about the Holocaust, Schwarz argues, is not just a literary but a moral problem. Each of his fifteen well-crafted chapters is a miniature lesson in the ethics of representing the unrepresentable. He takes us through the politics and the pitfalls and the artistic achievements of the major Holocaust narratives, and he does so with the sure hand of a master critic and the self-awareness of a true humanist. This is a book to read and to re-read.