1997 Articles

The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists

Roskies, David G.

One way that the Jews responded to their forcible concentration was through the creative anthology. At three known points on the Holocaust compass—Warsaw, Lodz, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—the very subjects of this coerced ingathering compiled anthologies whose aim it was to encompass the temporal and spatial, the linguistic and societal contours of the German blueprint. Just as the literature of and on World War I attempted to reflect the multinational and intergenerational scope of this first total war, which just yesterday had divided all of Europe along the Western, Eastern, and home fronts, so the aim of contemporary wartime anthologists was to reflect the pan-Jewish scope of this unprecedented slaughter.