Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust

Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust PDF Author: Petra M. Schweitzer
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739190083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life begins with the premise that writing proves virtually synonymous with survival, bearing the traces of life and of death carried within those who survived the atrocities of the Nazis. In reading specific testimonies by survivor-writers Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Olga Lengyel, Gisella Perl, and Dan Pagis, this text seeks to answer the question: How was it possible for these survivors to write about human destruction, if death is such an intimate part of the survivors’ survival? This book shows how the works of these survivors arise creatively from a vigorous spark, the desire to preserve memory. Testimony for each of these writers is a form of relation to oneself but also to others. It situates each survivor’s anguish in writing as a need to write so as to affirm life. Writing as such always bears witness to the life of the one who should be dead by now and thus to the miracle of having survived. This book’s claim is that the act of writing testimony manifests itself as the most intensive form of life possible. More specifically, its exploration of writing’s affirmation of life and assertion of identity focuses on the gendered dimension of expression and language. This book does not engage in the binary structure of gender and the hierarchically constructed roles in terms of privileging the male over the female. The criteria that guide its discussion on Gendered Testimonies emerge out of Levinas’s concept of maternity.

Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust

Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust PDF Author: Petra M. Schweitzer
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739190083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life begins with the premise that writing proves virtually synonymous with survival, bearing the traces of life and of death carried within those who survived the atrocities of the Nazis. In reading specific testimonies by survivor-writers Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Olga Lengyel, Gisella Perl, and Dan Pagis, this text seeks to answer the question: How was it possible for these survivors to write about human destruction, if death is such an intimate part of the survivors’ survival? This book shows how the works of these survivors arise creatively from a vigorous spark, the desire to preserve memory. Testimony for each of these writers is a form of relation to oneself but also to others. It situates each survivor’s anguish in writing as a need to write so as to affirm life. Writing as such always bears witness to the life of the one who should be dead by now and thus to the miracle of having survived. This book’s claim is that the act of writing testimony manifests itself as the most intensive form of life possible. More specifically, its exploration of writing’s affirmation of life and assertion of identity focuses on the gendered dimension of expression and language. This book does not engage in the binary structure of gender and the hierarchically constructed roles in terms of privileging the male over the female. The criteria that guide its discussion on Gendered Testimonies emerge out of Levinas’s concept of maternity.

Women in the Holocaust

Women in the Holocaust PDF Author: Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz
Publisher: B P Marketing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
Features testimonies detailing the oppression and forced labor of Jewish women during the Holocaust, who were important mainstays in their families.

Women in the Holocaust

Women in the Holocaust PDF Author: Zoe Waxman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199608687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book

Book Description
This publication is about the ways in which socially- and culturally-constructed gender roles were placed under extreme pressure, like in the Holocaust.

Women in the Holocaust

Women in the Holocaust PDF Author: Dalia Ofer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300080803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book

Book Description
Introduction : the role of gender in the Holocaust / Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer -- Gender and the Jewish family in modern Europe / Paula E. Hyman -- Keeping calm and weathering the storm : Jewish women's responses to daily life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 / Marion Kaplan -- The missing 52 percent : research on Jewish women in interwar Poland and its implications for Holocaust studies / Gershon Bacon -- Women in the Jewish labor bund in interwar Poland / Daniel Blatman -- Ordinary women in Nazi Germany : perpetrators, victims, followers, and bystanders / Gisela Bock -- The Grodno Ghetto and its underground : a personal narrative / Liza Chapnik -- The key game / Ida Fink -- 5050

Women and Holocaust

Women and Holocaust PDF Author: Andrea Pető
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 8365573032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book

Book Description
Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies.

Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

The Memory of Pain

The Memory of Pain PDF Author: Camila Loew
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401207062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
In this book, Camila Loew analyzes four women’s testimonial literary writings on the Holocaust to examine and question some of the tenets of the fields of Holocaust studies, gender studies, and testimony. Through a close reading of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ruth Klüger, and Marguerite Duras, Loew foregrounds these authors’ search for a written form to engage with their experiences of the extreme. Although each chapter contains its individual focus and features, the book possesses a unity in intention, concerns, and consequences. In the theoretical introduction that unites the four chapters, Loew eschews essentialism and revises the emergence of the field of Women and Holocaust studies from the early 1980s on, and signals some of its shortcomings. In response, and in accordance with a recent turn in various disciplines of the Humanities, Loew highlights the ethical dimension of testimony and its responsible commitment to the other. In dealing with the texts as literary testimonies—a complex genre, between literature and history—, testimony is freed from the obligation to respond to the requirements of factual truth, and becomes a privileged form to voice the traumatic event, and to symbolically explore the role of excess.

Life, Death and Sacrifice.

Life, Death and Sacrifice. PDF Author: Esther Hertzog
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781096251170
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
'...From out of a world of death and destruction, extermination camps, ghettos, starvation and disease, there rises the figure of the woman in the Holocaust... the core of the fascinating studies in this collection. The importance of these research essays is, above all, their historical documentation of situations and events related to women in the Holocaust...'....In the face of imminent death, there was kindness to be seen, self-sacrifice, and the saving of another's life. And from a world that had lost all semblance of humanity came a sense of independence that welled up in the survivors, infusing them with the spirit of life as they emerged from the inferno. 'And what is for me the most moving, the most exciting thing of all, is the ability of those who endured to climb to their feet and shake themselves free of the killing fields, to begin a new life, to start a family....' Ayala Procaccia, Israel Supreme Court Justice'The book contains articles by some of the most prominent scholars in the field... They tell the stories of women who were humiliated, tortured and murdered; their eternally etched-in-the-memory stories of struggle and survival. 'This collection of articles is based on two international conferences on women in the Holocaust, held in recent years at Beit Berl Academic College, Beit Theresienstadt, and the Ghetto Fighters' House in Israel. Hertzog is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, who never spoke about the subject at home. She discovered a feminist perspective on the Holocaust at a conference at Oxford she attended, almost by chance, seven years ago. That experience motivated her to speak with her mother and document their conversations in the article that appears herein.'Ruth Sinai ('"Their heroism was never acknowledged')Haaretz

Experience and Expression

Experience and Expression PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Baer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book

Book Description
The many powerful accounts of the Holocaust have given rise to women’s voices, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular and how they related to them. In Experience and Expression, the authors take on this challenge, providing the first book-length gendered analysis of women and the Holocaust, a topic that is emerging as a new field of inquiry in its own right. Accessible to readers on many levels, the essays portray the experiences of women of various religious and ethnic backgrounds, and draw from the fields of English, religion, nursing, history, law, comparative literature, philosophy, French, and German. The collection explores an array of fascinating topics: rescue and resistance, the treatment of Roma and Sinti women, the fate of female forced laborers, Holocaust politics, nurses at so-called euthanasia centers, women’s experiences of food and hunger in the camps, the uses and abuses of Anne Frank, and the representations of the Holocaust in art, film, and literature in the postwar era. The introduction provides a thorough overview of the current status of research in the field, and each essay seeks to push the theoretical boundaries that shape our understanding of women’s experience and agency during the Holocaust and of the ways in which they have expressed their memories.

Traumatism Realism

Traumatism Realism PDF Author: Michael Rothberg
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452904510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
How to approach the Holocaust and its relationship to late twentieth-century society? While some stress the impossibility of comprehending this event, others attempt representations in forms as different as the nonfiction novel (and Hollywood blockbuster) Schindler's List, the documentary Shoah, and the comic book Maus. This problem is at the center of Michael Rothberg's book, a focused account of the psychic, intellectual, and cultural aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of texts, Michael Rothberg puts forth an overarching framework for understanding representations of the Holocaust. Through close readings of such writers and thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Ruth Klüger, Charlotte Delbo, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth and an examination of films by Steven Spielberg and Claude Lanzmann, Rothberg demonstrates how the Holocaust as a traumatic event makes three fundamental demands on representation: a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the limits of representation, and a demand for engagement with the public sphere and commodity culture. As it establishes new grounding for Holocaust studies, his book provides a new understanding of realism, modernism, and postmodernism as responses to the demands of history.