Description

This book explores how contemporary Jewish writers and artists imagine the traumatic past of the Holocaust, in 'returning' to Poland or in encounters with the German Other, in their imagination and in reality. It asks what the future is of a history that haunts Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, and how the narratives of memory shape the way we think about the collective and personal past. It examines contemporary Jewish texts created by major authors in Israel and the Diaspora that display disturbing trends in the transmission of Holocaust memory which put in doubt or undermine the process of working through necessary for coming to terms with the past. Some are provocatively transgressive, others present double binds of the impossibility of becoming free from the past and achieving closure.This book therefore argues for the need to maintain a sustainable cultural framework that can give meaning to collective memory without, on the one hand, it becoming a compulsive obsession, or, on the other hand, being reduced to ceremonial commemoration or superficial universalization of global suffering from genocide or abuse.