A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction [Hardcover]

Ruth Franklin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 12, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0195313968 | ISBN-13: 978-0195313963

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history?
Or is it okay to lie in such works?

In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir.

Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This text is superbly written and offers insightful analysis." - Library Journal

"...Franklin explicates her central ideas with a piercing, graceful lucidity... a beautiful book that addresses the ugliest of subjects, proving, once more, that it can be done." - Washington Post

"...by scrupulously defending the integrity of literature, Ms. Franklin has offered her own eloquent testimony." --Wall Street Journal

"Ruth Franklin's keen analysis makes a major contribution to the literary criticism of Shoah writers, and her humane perspective renders the nuances of a fraught subject newly comprehensible." --Jewish Book Council

"...an honest effort to inject a little good sense and judgment into an understandably emotional subject." - Jewish Literary Review

"Ruth Franklin's new book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, is therefore more than a towering work of criticism and insight - it's an invaluable corrective." - The Atlantic

"...a brilliant, challenging and surprising work." - Jewish Journal

"What A Thousand Darknesses does do, and does very well, is challenge us on every level of virtually every aspect of Holocaust literature. That the Holocaust is 'unknowable' doesn't mean that a lot of it can't be known. Literature lays bare the path to know what is knowable, and Franklin neatly shows us the way." - The Jewish Daily Forward

"A Thousand Darknesses succeeds in forming a coherent whole that makes a powerful argument for the propriety of treating the Holocaust as a wellspring of literary art." - Commentary

"Franlin is particularly astute in evaluating why the grayness of truth is important in a Holocaust work...Not merely about the Holocaust, but about why we study history, why we read, and why we tell stories." --The Literary Review

"[An] important work...Lucid, persuasive...Highly recommended." --Choice

About the Author

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195313968
• ISBN-13: 978-0195313963
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,137,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and a contributing editor at the New Republic. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, received glowing reviews in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications, and was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Writing. The Atlantic called the book "a towering work of criticism and insight." Tablet magazine has named her "one of our most important critics under forty." She is currently working on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson, to be published by Norton in 2016.

Ms. Franklin has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Slate, Granta, the Jewish Review of Books, and Salmagundi, to which she contributes a regular film column. Last year she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing. She is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in biography and the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. In September 2012, she will begin a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Ms. Franklin received a B.A. in English literature from Columbia University and an M.A. in comparative literature from Harvard. She has delivered lectures at numerous colleges and universities, including Columbia, New York University, Brandeis, Colgate, and Goucher. She has been a resident at Yaddo and a guest at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A lively, engaging and masterful treatment of a difficult subject December 16, 2010

By Brooklyn Bridge

Format:Hardcover

This jewel of a book addresses difficult questions concerning the representation and narration of the Holocaust and also the use of that dark episode of history as material for creative writing.
My apprehensions about it, having read only one of the books the author considers, were soon put to rest. The author provided enough relevant detail to give me a sense of those books and steer me through her argument. If anything, I'm now looking forward to reading some of them.
The writing is clear, elegant and direct. The book is evidently based on extensive research and draws on a number of authors and texts, many predating the Holocaust, Oscar Wilde, for instance. The tone of the book is lively and engaging and I think it was this that kept the grimness of the subject from overwhelming my reading experience.
Quite possibly the only uncontroversial thing one can say on the subject of the representation and literary treatment of the Holocaust is that it's fraught with controversy. I hope it's not too controversial to suggest that books such as these might have a wider relevance than only to issues arising out of the literary treatment of the Holocaust. The author's discussion and argument must have some use in thinking about how we reflect on major historical events generally, not just artistically and not just the Holocaust.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking monograph November 9, 2011

By David Johnson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a well-considered evaluation of the literature that surrounds the Holocaust. Rather than discuss the events of the Holocaust, Franklin evaluates the different ideas that have grown up around the tremendously diverse media about the Holocaust. This is a refreshing perspective and gives the reader a good sense of how media can be used to cope with the trauma of an event as well as the taboos that seem to have developed about that media.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews July 26, 2011

By AJL Reviews

Format:Hardcover

How future generations will know about the horrors of the Holocaust has been a question in the minds of survivors, scholars, artists, politicians and many others from as early as the war period itself. In the depths of the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum was concerned enough with this issue that he organized the collecting of the Oyneg Shabes Archive to document and describe, in every format possible, that which was witnessed in the ghetto.
Ruth Franklin realized, when she set out to write her book, that there are those, who like Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, insisted that only a person who actually lived through the Holocaust could truly tell future generations about it and that in some way art and the Holocaust could not coexist. So it seems that the memoirs and oral histories of the survivors would be, to this school of thought, the only sources of acceptable evidence about those terrible, incomprehensible times. On the other hand, Franklin insists that "if we look to literature...to teach us about life, then it is no wonder that we desperately desire it to teach us also about the Holocaust... one of the most obscene catastrophes in history." So the compromise must be "to find a secure place, somewhere between memory and imagination (Langer)," in order to properly remember the victims. Franklin accepts the premise that there really is no clear line, but rather a fuzzy one, separating memoirs and literature, truth and fiction, history and art.
The author thoroughly researched the literature, classical and the most contemporary, for all that she could find on the tensions mentioned above. She then chose to study writers on the Holocaust, witnesses as well as `those who came after' and analyzed their works in a most brilliant manner. The first group includes Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Rawicz, Kosinski and Kertesz. In the second group are: Keneally and Spielberg, Koeppen, Sebald, Schlink and, of course Wilkomirski and other writers of very recent works.
It is regretable that she did not include Aharon Appelfeld as one of the authors to analyze, even though he was very young during the Holocaust. He would have been an excellent example of someone who could belong in either of the two groups and, as James E. Young stated: "If there is a line between fact and fiction, it may by necessity be a winding border that tends to bind these two categories as much as it separates them, allowing each side to dissolve occasionally into the other." That is certainly true in Appelfeld's body of work.
Any library, academic, high school or synagogue with a good collection of Holocaust works, fictional as well historical, should include this superb work of analysis of some of the most important and controversial Holocaust fiction.
Michlean Amir