2025 Chapters (Layout Features)

Holocaust Literature

Roskies, David G.

Poetry played an outsized role in the Nazi ghettos and labor camps and was the first wartime genre to reach the free world. Poets also became the public — and tragic voice of the armed resistance. Beginning with the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank and Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, both in 1947, however, the heroism of the Holocaust came to be understood as the heroism of small deeds, of parental sacrifice, bonding, loyalty, and love; its tragedy, contrariwise, as the tragedy of choiceless choices, sudden reversals, silences, and betrayals. Writer-survivors, who found makeshift ways to affiliate with one another, were jointly responsible for the institutionalization of Holocaust literature, for the gradual shift from realism to allegory to metafiction, and for the subjective wartime experience of women to be considered a subject worthy of Holocaust literature.

Keywords: Wartime writing. Poetry. Testimony. Writer-survivors. Women in the Holocaust. The institutionalization of Holocaust literature.