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A Critical Approach to the Holocaust Short Story THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY by Mary Catherine Mueller APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: . Dr. David A. Patterson, Chair . Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth . Dr. Nils Roemer . Dr. Rainer Schulte Copyright 2018 Mary Catherine Mueller All Rights Reserved To my family In memory of my father, Clem In honor of my mother, Pamela THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY by MARY CATHERINE MUELLER, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITITES – STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness.” – Lamentations 3:22-23 To my professors: I am grateful for each one of you whom I have had the pleasure of learning from and working with throughout my academic journey. I am also thankful for the financial assistance that I received throughout my graduate and doctoral studies; I would not have been able to complete my doctoral studies without financial support in the form of research grants, travel grants, Teaching Assistantships, the Mike Jacobs Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, and Research Assistantships. To my Dissertation Committee: My doctoral research and dissertation writing would not have been possible without the guidance and encouragement of my Dissertation Committee – specifically my Chair, Dr. David Patterson. Thank you, Dr. Patterson, for your profound insights, encouraging feedback, and continuous guidance whilst I was researching and writing my dissertation. I will always appreciate the time I spent learning from you. Thank you, Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, for your wisdom, mentorship, and friendship. I will always remember our conversations about literature, ideas, and research that we shared while drinking a cup of the “most incredible espresso in the world!” Thank you, Dr. Nils Roemer, for your leadership and generosity. As you serve as the Director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, I wish to thank you for the financial assistance that I received in the form of research grants, travel grants, and a Research Assistant, for which I was able to continue my doctoral work. I will always appreciate my time at the Ackerman Center and my time learning from and working with you, v Dr. Patterson, and Dr. Ozsváth. In addition to the financial and academic support that I received from the those affiliated with the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, I wish to thank Dr. Rainer Schulte, Director of the Center for Translation Studies. Thank you, Dr. Schulte, for your kindness and generosity. I will always be grateful that our paths crossed, and that I was able to work with you as a Research Assistant for the Center for Translation Studies. Finally, I wish to thank each member of my Committee for your patience and understanding when I had to take a break from my dissertation writing to help care for my mother, Pamela, who was in the hospital for over five months battling lymphoma. Your kindness was profound. To my family and friends: I thank God for you and appreciate you more than words can express. I would not be here today without the steadfast love, prayer, and encouragement of my mother, Pamela, and my seven siblings: Tiffany, Bert, Caroline, Juliana, John, Grace, and Matthew. To my parents: I am also especially grateful for your love and how you instilled in me a love of learning. Mother, I am thankful for the daily example both you and Daddy set for us in how you treated each other and everyone – whether friend or stranger – with love, kindness, and care. While my father is not here to read this or see me graduate due to losing his battle with stage four inoperable pancreatic cancer almost 10 years ago, I am thankful for having had such a kind, righteous, and wise father, whose unwavering love for the Lord Jesus Christ and for us set an example of walking with God and loving others (Proverbs 20:7). I am thankful for the opportunity of this unique path that the Lord has led me on to study the Holocaust throughout my doctoral work, and I am thankful for each person I have met along the way: survivors of the Holocaust, scholars, mentors, peers, colleagues, and friends. Now, as I teach about this topic to my students, I do so in the hopes of encouraging them to always strive to vi see the significance of every life, and to always seek to do what is right, what is true, and what is good. Lastly, I would like to thank every person battling cancer – especially, those fighting pancreatic cancer and lymphoma. You are heroes. This is for you. Thank you. March 2018 vii THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY Mary Catherine Mueller, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Dr. David A. Patterson In my dissertation I investigate the various horror scenes of the Holocaust seen through the eyes of the short story. Clearly, the genre of the short story is distinctly different from a novel or a novella. The latter two genres allow the author to engage in extensive descriptions of characters and situations. The element of time and size allows the novelist to describe character developments and objects in great detail. However, the short story must recreate the explosiveness of the moment. In that sense, the short story writer replaces detailed descriptions by the invention of striking tensions in character juxtapositions and unusual images and metaphors. It is the explosiveness of the moment that recreates the horrifying emotional reactions of the reader. The short story lives on the dissonant confrontation of words, images, and sounds. Thus, it might be said that the short story comes closer to the portrayal of the horrifying pictures of the Holocaust than the novel. The chapters of my dissertation explore the different techniques that short story writers have used to bring the reader closer to the experiences of the daily life in the concentration camps. The main themes that underlie the various chapters of my work deal viii with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. All of a sudden, man loses an identity and becomes an anti-man who lives in an anti-world. The image for that anti-man gains presence through the character of Muselmann, who has lost all human energy and collapses on the ground in a physical state reminiscent of a person bowing over praying. All of the short stories that I have chosen lead the reader into a never-ending inferno whose doors all open to the death chamber. In each of these stories, as the writers display an enormous creativity in the objects and situations, they have chosen to come closer to an expression of the unending horror that probably cannot fully be expressed through the power of words. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………...v ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………….viii INTRODUCTION: THE COLLAPSE OF TIME………………………….……………………..1 CHAPTER I: THE FEATURES OF THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY…………………...12 CHAPTER II: THE COLLAPSE OF SILENCE: THE ROLE OF SILENCE IN IDA FINK’S SHORT STORIES……………………………………………………………………………….41 CHAPTER III: THE COLLAPSE OF MAN – AND THEN MAN CREATED THE ANTI-MAN: THE ROLE OF THE MUSSELMAN FIGURE IN SELECT SHORT STORIES FROM TADEUSZ BOROWSKI’S THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN………...73 CHAPTER IV: THE COLLAPSE OF RELATIONSHIPS AND HOME: THE NAZI ASSAULT ON RELATIONSHIPS, FAMILY, AND HOME AS PORTRAYED IN TWO YIDDISH HOLOCAUST SHORT STORIES……………………………………………………………..108 CHAPTER V: THE COLLAPSE OF MOTHERHOOD AS SEEN IN CYNTHIA OZICK’S SHORT STORY: “THE SHAWL” …………………………………………………………….142 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………170 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………....174 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...186 CURRICULUM VITAE………………………………………………………...……………...188 x INTRODUCTION THE COLLAPSE OF TIME “For two long years [those who went to the crematorium] trod through me, their eyes penetrating mine. And time there, on planet Auschwitz, was not like time here. Each moment there revolved around the cogwheels of a different time-sphere. Hell-years last longer than light- years.”1 – Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision Like testimonies piecing together the horror and enormity of a crime, Holocaust short stories individually convey a defining aspect of the Nazis’ assault on the soul – the collapse of time and unraveling of human relations. In these short stories, the collapse of time is connected with the collapse of the yet-to-be that constitutes meaningful human relationships. To be in a relationship is to be there for the sake of another, which opens up a response yet to be offered, a task yet to be engaged. In the short story, we see this collapse of time in the form of the explosiveness of a moment, which portrays wherever the relationship to another, for the sake of another, is crushed by oppressive hands of hate and death that yielded the Holocaust and “Planet Auschwitz.” When addressing the short story, Michael Kardos writes: “There must always be a necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning, because a story’s form is part of what creates meaning.”2 While some scholars address these authors and their stories, they tend to approach these stories by situating them in conjunction with other literary genres, rather than as their own genre. Even though there are thousands of Holocaust short stories that address the collapse of time and relationships, this genre is one of the least researched in Holocaust literature.
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