Holocaust Literature

What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core consisting of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, tales of individual survival in hiding? Is it the same everywhere: in the West as in the East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and sui generis, or can it be studied in the light of other literatures? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now--and why?

Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. Within weeks of the liberation, in displaced persons camps, a new memorial literature begins to take shape. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: "communal memory," still internal and internecine; "provisional memory" in the '60s and '70s, with the birth of a self-conscious Holocaust genre; and "authorized memory," in which we live today.

Twenty book covers--first editions in their original languages--and a guide to the "first hundred books" together show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.

DAVID G. ROSKIES is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. NAOMI DIAMANT is director of Dean's Office Affairs, Stern School of Business, New York University.