Modern Hebrew Literature – Writing the Holocaust (2017)

This SIIS faculty syllabus explores the theme of the Holocaust in modern Hebrew literature. Important critical theory texts provide an instructive lens through which major themes can be discussed.

 

Essential Reading

Ka-tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur): Selection from House of Dolls (1955)

 Ka-tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur)
Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz
(Citadel Press, 1987)
ISBN/ISSN: 0806510226

 

Ka-tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur) Shivitti: A Vision (1987)

Yehiel De-Nur: Testimony at the trial of Adolf Eichmann

Aharon Appelfeld: “Three,” Smoke (1962)

Nathan Alterman: “About the Child Abram” (1944)

Leah Goldberg: Lady of the Castle (1954)

Leah Goldberg: Will There Yet Come

 

Recommended Reading

Omer Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 3:2, (1997), pp. 42–76

Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “Discourses of Morning and Rebirth in Post-Holocaust Israel Literature: Leah Goldberg’s Lady of the Castle and Shulamith

Hareven’s “The Witness”, Hebrew Studies, Vol. 31, (1990), pp. 71-85 (1990)

 

Shoshana Felman

“A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law”

The Juridical Unconscious: Trails and Traumas in the Twentieth Century

(Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 2002)

ISBN/ISSN: 0674009312

 

Avner Holtzman: “’They Are Different People’: Holocaust Survivors as Reflected in the Fiction of the Generation of 1948,” Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 32,(2002), pp. 337-368.

Dominick LaCapra: “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25/4, 696-727 (1999)

 

Recommended Viewing

“God Almighty, When Will It End?” Subliminal & Miri Ben-Ari (2007)