University of Alberta Silence and Voices: Family History and Memorialization in Intergenerational Holocaust Literature by Sarah Shewchuk A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Comparative Literature ©Sarah Shewchuk Fall 2012 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette thèse. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformément à la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privée, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de thesis. cette thèse. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. For Pearce and Lewis Abstract As survivors age, soon there will be no living witnesses of the Holocaust. At this turning point in history, my research examines how, and for what purposes, family history has been recorded by members of multiple generations of Jewish families in France, Canada, and the United States. Within an intergenerational continuum, my research compares works in English and French by Irène Némirovsky, Élisabeth Gille, Denise Epstein, Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Simon Schneiderman, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jonathan Safran Foer in order to assess the various ways in which members of different generations have grappled with the Holocaust and its aftermath, as well as how they have memorialized Holocaust victims, survivors, and their descendents in different textual forms. By situating the works that I have chosen within a larger memorial tradition, examining the changing nature of textual memorialization in the digital age, and assessing the pedagogical role of literary representations of Holocaust family history, my research addresses the implications of intergenerational Holocaust literature for contemporary readers and members of generations that are yet to come. Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to my supervisor Dr. Jonathan Hart and Dr. Uri Margolin for believing in this project since its inception and to Dr. Hart for giving so generously of his time and knowledge throughout this process. Thank you also to the members of my examination committee, Dr. Irene Sywenky, Dr. John-Paul Himka, Dr. Patricia Demers, Dr. Massimo Verdicchio, and Dr. Christian Riegel. Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Alberta, the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Government of Alberta, and the Dan David Foundation for their financial support. I am also grateful to Mike Perschon, Janey Kennedy, and the members of the Critical Memory Studies Workshop at the University of Alberta. Finally, and most importantly, thank you to my husband Pearce Shewchuk, my parents Scott and Mary Jefferies, and all those whose stories inspired and haunted me along the way. Table of Contents Introduction: The Textual Record 1 Part One: Family History and Memorialization in Intergenerational Holocaust Literature 4 Part Two: Texts in Context: Memorialization, Generational Categorization, Narrative, and Family History 18 Part Three: The Textual Record Revisited 51 Chapter One: Family History: Holocaust Victims and the ‘1.5 Generation’ 53 Part One: Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française 59 Part Two: Élisabeth Gille’s Le mirador: mémoires rêvés and Le paysage de cendres and Denise Epstein’s Survivre et vivre: entretiens avec Clémence Boulouque 90 Part Three: Conclusion 120 Chapter Two: Ways of Looking at the Past: The 0.5 Generation, Their Children, and the Second Generation 125 Part One: Mayer Kirshenblatt’s and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust 134 Part Two: Simon Schneiderman’s Preoccupied with My Father 165 Part Three: Conclusion 185 Chapter Three: ‘Return’ Narratives: The Third Generation and the Grandchildren of the 0.5 Generation 193 Part One: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million 203 Part Two: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated 229 Part Three: Conclusion 267 Conclusion: Off the Printed Page 272 Part One: A Digital World 274 Part Two: The Scholar and the Text, The Text and the Classroom 290 Part Three: Silence and Voices 305 Endnotes 307 Works Cited 320 1 Introduction The Textual Record “The time of horrors I leave for future worlds. I write because I must write – a consolation in my time of horror. For future generations I leave it as a trace” (Kruk, N. pag.).1 So wrote Herman Kruk in 1944, in a diary that recorded his experiences in Warsaw, the Vilna Ghetto, and Estonian labour camps between September 1939 and September 1944 (N. pag., ix).2 Kruk was born in Płock, Poland in 1897 and fled to Vilna during the Second World War (Harshav, Introduction xl, xliii). There, in “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” he established the Vilna ghetto library and worked to rescue books and manuscripts from the Nazis as part of “The Paper Brigade” (Harshav, Introduction xxix, xliv-xlv, Sutter 226). According to Benjamin Harshav, “[o]n September 17, 1944, one day before the liberation by the Red Army, Kruk buried his last diaries in Lagedi camp in the presence of six witnesses. The next day, he and most remaining Jews in Klooga and Lagedi were shot and burned on a pyre” (Preface xix, xlvii). After the war, Nisan Anolik, a member of that group of witnesses, retrieved Kruk’s diary and returned it to Vilna (Harshav, Preface xix). Later, what had been recovered of this diary and other parts of Kruk’s writing were “assembled and published in the original Yiddish by YIVO in 1961” (Harshav, Preface xix, xvii, xiii). After over four decades, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, edited by Harshav and translated into English by Barbara Harshav, was released (Harshav, Introduction xlvii). Not only is Harshav’s work a testament to Kruk’s belief in the possibilities of the written word and a heart-wrenching example of the textual records that 2 were created for future generations during the Holocaust, but it is also a fascinating example of the textual reconstructive process in which members of those generations have engaged. In Harshav’s extensive Introduction, he discusses the difficulties associated with assembling the remnants of Kruk’s diary that did not appear in the previous edition, as well as contending with the blanks in the text that resulted from the sections of the narrative that did not survive (Harshav, xlvii-li). Throughout my research, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania has functioned as a striking reminder that what is written in a book is not the only story that is contained within a work – the events surrounding a work’s creation, dissemination, and reception are also important parts of the stories it can tell (Young, Writing 37, 10, 38). Kruk’s diary is only one of the many types of written and visual records that were created in ghettos, concentration camps, and hiding places throughout Europe during the Second World War (Ezrahi 20-21). As Elie Wiesel writes in the Foreward to The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, the Holocaust “left in its wake not cemeteries but books, nothing more than books: documents, albums, testimony, chronicles, intimate journals, and memoirs. That was all that remained – reams and reams of paper” (N. pag.). This “paper universe,” contains, for example, the hundreds of drawings and paintings that were created by children in Theresienstadt, the writing of the Oyneg Shabes, a group of historians who documented life under Nazi rule and buried their writing underneath the Warsaw Ghetto, The Diary of Petr Ginz, which was uncovered in an attic in Prague in 2003, and Samuel Goldfard’s diary from 1943, which was 3 published in The Diary of Samuel Goldfard and the Holocaust in Galicia in 2011 (Weisel N.