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Survivors Fictionalizing the Child: a Canon Within the Canon of Holocaust Literature

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Survivors Fictionalizing the Child: a Canon Within the Canon of Holocaust Literature Survivors Fictionalizing the Child: A Canon Within the Canon of Holocaust Literature Lia Molly Deromedi Submitted to the University of London for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY October 2014 Department of English Royal Holloway, University of London Declaration of Authorship I, Lia Molly Deromedi, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: i Abstract This thesis argues that there is a subgenre within Holocaust literature of survivors writing from the child's perspective. Both the survivor’s novel and children occupy multiple spaces, which provides a unique vantage point from which to represent the Holocaust. There are three key attributes of the primary texts within my subgenre: they are all considered novels, their authors are classified as Holocaust survivors, and they have child protagonists. I have identified unifying themes across the texts that show how the child’s viewpoint offers a distinct perspective on the historical event, depicts an underrepresented experience, and provides the potential for new understandings on the Holocaust. Each chapter focuses on one theme, examining how each author uses the child's perspective across disparate genders, ages, geographical locations, and traumatic experiences, which implies that this subgenre is making critical assertions about the Holocaust and the Jewish child’s experience. Chapter One focuses on the dichotomy between children and adults, examining the interactions between and actions of their child protagonists with adult characters. In this way, authors underscore the end of childhood in extremity, a loss for both children prematurely killed or who must prematurely develop, as well as the loss of traditional functions of adults by inverting concepts of dependents and guardians. The second chapter briefly explores the way the novels use child’s play to highlight the aforementioned changed nature of childhood. Despite often assuming adult responsibilities and attitudes as described in the first chapter, traditional childhood activities can serve to contrast the brutality and hardship with their inherent innocence. Chapter Three explores the novel’s representations of a three-fold identity, which signifies how the protagonists' sense of themselves during the experience is shaped by their positions as an outsider, Jewishness, and gender. The fourth chapter examines how these narratives reconstruct the concept of place, give it meaning, and represent it by creating a Holocaust ‘child-space’ for its youngest experiencers. The child-space is represented by several qualities, including: liminal and paradoxical spaces such as rural and urban settings; specific sites of meaning and concepts of home; belonging to nation states and cities; and the narrative spaces that the authors create. Analyzing these novels through the patterns that develop between different characters and narratives may impact debates about the portrayal of the childhood self in all writing, as well as contribute to discussions of the Holocaust beyond the child’s experience. The fictional child’s viewpoint could address some of the questions that are raised by the ethical concerns about imaginative Holocaust representation and the limits of language, suggesting that it is a form to be considered for thinking about the endurance of Holocaust narratives. ii Acknowledgments It would not have been possible to write this doctoral thesis without the help and support of the family, friends, colleagues, and mentors around me, only some of whom it is possible to mention here. I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Robert Eaglestone. I would like to thank him for encouraging my ideas, for his patience answering my every niggling question, pushing me to do my best, and for helping me to grow as a researcher and person. His advice and support on my research as well as my future career have been invaluable. Special appreciation also goes to my adviser, Professor Betty Jay, for offering valuable feedback throughout. I would like to thank the English Department and Royal Holloway, University of London for the financial, academic, and technical support of my research and career goals. In particular, thank you for the Crosslands Research Scholarship and the London University Research Grant to undertake research at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. I would like to give a special thanks to my family. Words cannot adequately acknowledge my parents, Dennis and Eddi, and my brother, Adam, for supporting me in my academic and life endeavors and encouraging me throughout this experience. But, all the same, thank you. iii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgments ii Table of Contents iii Introduction 1 The distinctive child viewpoint 2 Categorization and novelization 1 Who is the survivor-writer? 8 Introduction to primary texts 12 Themes and thesis organization 22 Conclusion 23 Chapter I: The Child-Adult Dichotomy – Interactions and Actions 25 The child-adult dichotomy and child point of view 25 Interactions: Roles and relationships 31 Children surpassing parental shortcomings 31 The hidden voice and dependency for survival 37 Where adult weakness facilitates child strength 47 Actions: Premature maturity 54 How the novel drives the dichotomy 69 Chapter II: ‘Tomato!’ – Play and Fixtures of Childhood 71 Imagination and distraction in ghettos and camps 74 Playing a part: Recreation and deception in hiding 81 Desperate play 88 Chapter III: The Formation of a Three-Fold Identity 96 Introduction: Three-fold identities 96 Others to themselves and others: Particular outsiders 102 Animal instincts, characteristics, and roles 105 The split self in hiding 110 Distinct categories: Mischling, refugee, and survivor 115 ‘Who asks a Jewish boy in Auschwitz who he is?’: Jewishness 124 Sewing on Jewishness 126 Lies and masquerades: Hidden Jewishness 133 Incomplete Jewishness 145 Sexual identity: The body and gender 152 Three-fold identities and prematurity 166 Chapter IV: Child-space – Places of the Holocaust Novel 168 Introduction: Places of the Holocaust 168 Liminal and paradoxical spaces: Between boundaries of the rural and urban 175 Iconic incarcerations 179 Hiding places: Cities, villages, forests, and fields 182 The unchosen choice of movement 190 Specific sites, homes, and places of meaning 193 New homes behind wire and walls 195 Constantly changing attachments 200 Non-traditional places of meaning and other people’s homes 205 Nation states and cities 211 Narrative spaces 221 New spaces of understanding 231 Conclusion 234 Issues of ethics and aesthetics 234 Limitations of this study and points of future research 235 Summary of key points 237 Conclusion 239 Bibliography 241 1 Introduction Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks. JANE YOLEN1 The wanton and savage extermination of children, and the bottomless ferocity with which children were treated prior to their extermination, is unmatched in the total history of humanity. ISRAEL KNOX2 Aharon Appelfeld, both a survivor and a writer, claimed that in the search for a way to communicate the incommunicable, a ‘“new form,” if one may call it that, was discovered by the children.’3 Following Appelfeld, in this thesis I make a case for a new subgenre within the canon of Holocaust literature: survivor-written fiction from the child’s perspective. There are three key components of the primary texts within this subgenre: they all have child protagonists, they are all considered novels, and their authors are defined as Jewish Holocaust survivors. I argue that this subgenre offers a unique perspective on the historical event and represents many lesser-known Holocaust experiences. It also gives expression to the muted voice of the child. Moreover, interpretations of the child’s viewpoint in novels written by survivors can offer special insight into some of the questions raised by the concerns about imaginative Holocaust representation. In order to define this subgenre, I identify unifying themes in ten works; some of these have only been published in English in recent years, others are well established among the Holocaust literature canon. My thesis advances the discussions 1 Jane Yolen, The Devil’s Arithmetic (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1997), p. 170 2 Israel Knox, ‘Introduction’ in Anthology of Holocaust Literature ed. by Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, and Samuel Margoshes (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), pp. xiii-xxiii (p. xiv), p. xv (emphasis the author’s) 3 Aharon Appelfeld, ‘After the Holocaust’ in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. by Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1988), pp. 83-92 (p. 89) 2 begun by literary scholars like Sue Vice, Naomi Sokoloff, and Andrea Reiter.4 I begin by introducing the three key components of this subgenre. The distinctive child viewpoint Survivor-writer Imre Kertész claims that his use of language and perspective of young Gyuri in Fatelessness ‘had the effect of estranging me from the narrative a bit, the perspective became one of observation […] [that] threw a kind of existential glance on the events’.5 I argue that this ‘existential glance’ is best understood as a form of Otherness, unique to the child’s perspective. This Otherness has a number of effects. First, if it is true that ‘[aesthetically], the literary representation of horror has an inherent falsity, in that it requires the writer to impose a coherent pattern or form where in reality there was only chaos’,6 the child viewpoint can bring some of this chaos to the forefront through the fragmented representation of the child’s experiences. Second, the child’s perspective has the ability to depict the complex and little understood interrelations of childhood and the Holocaust: relationships with adults and peers, school, religion, and developmental stages, as well as reactions to trauma.
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