Table Of ContentTHE SUBJECT OF HOLOCAUST FICTION
JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor
THE SUBJECT OF
HOLOCAUST FICTION
Emily Miller Budick
Indiana University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2015 by Emily Miller Budick
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Budick, E. Miller, author.
The subject of Holocaust fiction / Emily Miller Budick.
pages cm. — (Jewish literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01630-0 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-
253-01626-3 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01632-4 (eb)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. I. Title.
PN56.H55B83 2015+
809.3'9358405318—dc23
2014041962
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For
Hananel, Micha, Amos, and Noga Almakies
Tzeelah, Avital, and Carmel Sharon
You are the joys of your grandparents’ lives. May you
each grow into the person you wish to become; may you
continue to include your grandparents in your lives; and
may you always be mindful not only of the sadness and
tragedies of the Jewish past but also of its triumphs.
This book is also dedicated to the memory of our son
Yochanan Budick
who, had he lived, would certainly have been,
like his siblings, nieces, and nephews, a vibrant
contributor to the life of the people he so loved.
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
P rologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust:
The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me 19
Section i. Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust
1 V oyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish:
Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl 41
2 Forced Confessions:
Subject Position, Framing, and the “Art” of Spiegelman’s Maus 70
3 Aryeh Lev Stollman’s The Far Euphrates:
Re-Picturing the Pre-Memory Moment 100
Section ii. Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs:
Complicated Mourning and the Intertextual
Construction of a Jewish Symptom
4 Bruno Schulz, the Messiah, and Ghost/writing the Past 127
5 A Jewish History of Blocked Mourning and Love 146
6 See Under: Mourning 163
Section iii. Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald
7 Blacks, Jews, and Southerners in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice 185
8 ( Re)Reading the Holocaust from a German Point of View:
Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader 195
viii | Contents
9 Mourning and Melancholia in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz 209
Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals:
J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond’s
“Difficulty of Reality” 228
Bibliography 239
Index 247
Acknowledgments
T
hiS book haS been a long time in the writing. Many of the debts I have
amassed are now so woven into the fabric of my being, let alone into the book
itself, that I can no longer pick them apart. Therefore, to all my friends and fam-
ily, colleagues and students, with whom I’ve entered into conversation on this
subject, I am thankful for the enlightenment and illumination I have received.
You know who you are.
Some debts are easier to retrieve, such as the journals and collections that
have not only given me permission to reprint from the materials that went into
writing this book but also helped to shape that material in the first place. There-
fore, I want to thank the journal Common Knowledge, which first printed an early
version of the Ghost Writer arguments as “The Haunted House of Fiction: Ghost-
writing the Holocaust,” Common Knowledge 5 (1996): 120–35, and Prooftexts,
which published “Forced Confessions: History, Psychoanalysis, and the ‘Art’ of
Holocaust Fiction; The Case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Prooftexts 21 (2002): 379–
98. My gratitude also goes to Marc Lee Raphael, whose two conferences resulted
in “Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Holocaust Fiction: The Case of Cynthia
Ozick’s The Shawl,” in The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film,
ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2003),
1:1–28, and “The Holocaust, Trauma, and the Jewish Fiction of Tzimtzum: Aryeh
Lev Stollman’s Far Euphrates,” in The Representation of the Holocaust in Litera-
ture and Film, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and
Mary, 2007), 2:24–39. Many of the materials that constitute section 2 of the book
first appeared in an essay titled “Survivor Guilt and Incomplete Mourning: The
Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon:
Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth. R. Wisse, ed. Justin Cammy,
Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 517–31.
From February 2012 to November 2012 I was a fellow at the Center for Ad-
vanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Wash-
ington, D.C. I am grateful to the museum staff and to Phyllis Greenberg Heide-
man and Richard D. Heideman, who provided the fellowship that paid for my
stay there.
I am especially thankful to Rami Aronzon, with whom I coauthored the
book that was my introduction into the field of the unconscious mind: Psycho-
therapy and the Everyday Life. Even though this was a practical book rather than
a scholarly book, it provided me with the background in Freud’s theories of
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