Publisher:
Yale University Press, New Haven
;
EBSCO Industries, Inc., Birmingham, AL, USA
"Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting." "Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt...
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"Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting." "Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-207)
Preempting the Holocaust -- Legacy in gray : the ordeal of Primo Levi -- Gendered suffering : women in Holocaust testimonies -- The alarmed vision : social suffering and Holocaust atrocity -- Landscapes of Jewish experience : the Holocaust art of Samuel Bak -- Two Holocaust voices : Cynthia Ozick and Art Spiegelman -- The stage of memory : parents and children in Holocaust texts and testimonies -- The inner life of the Kovno ghetto -- Undzere Kinder : a Yiddish film from Poland -- Wiesenthal's Sunflower dilemma : a response -- Opening locked doors : reflections on teaching the Holocaust
