The Jewish Anthological Imagination in the Holocaust, 1940−1945

Abstract

In this paper the author analyzes five anthologies published in Yiddish, Hebrew and English. They represent individual and collective Jewish responses to the Holocaust both inside and outside the occupied war zone. When we read synoptically, each of them can be perceived as different national, transnational or communal Jewish response to the catastrophe. When we read dialogically, however, each anthology betrays a dissonant or discordant voice, and it is precisely the anomalous utterance that calls out the Holocaust’s screaming contradictions. By “listening anthologically,” combining a synoptic and dialogical reading, the Jewish anthological imagination in wartime becomes audible in all its tragic complexity

Keywords

• anthologies
• Jewish
• the Holocaust in Poland
• wartime writing
• Jewish responses to Shoah
• Zionism