Aharon Appelfeld: A Hundred Years of Jewish Solitude The Holocaust has already engendered more historical re-
search than any single event in Jewish history, but I have
no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the
historian's anvil, but in the novelist's crucible. -- Y. H. Yerushalmi, in Zakhor
By GILA RAMRAS-RAUCH 1. INTRODUCTION. The literature
of the Shoah is
complex, varied, and multifaceted. It is a literature
of commemoration, testimony, and document. It is
a literature of both fact and fiction, and occasionally
the barriers between the two blend and become un-
clear. It is ultimately an attempt against all odds to
give verbal expression to an experience that chal-
lenges and defies the boundaries of language yet
emerges through it. Indeed, some scholars challenge
the clear division between "fact" and fiction: "The
role of the critic here is not to sort 'fact' from fiction
in Holocaust literary testimony, but to sustain an
awareness of both the need for unmediated facts in
this literature and the simultaneous incapacity in
narrative to document these facts."1 By comparison,
the words of George Steiner carry an emotive tone:
"The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it
lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is
to risk the survivance of language as creator and
bearer of humane, rational truth."2 And yet, the
restoration of memory through language allows for a
modicum of re-creation, conceptualization, and rep-
resentation. Geoffrey Hartman claims that even in
the case of the Shoah "there are no limits of repre-
sentation, only limits of conceptualization."3 The issue of representation is a major issue when
the fiction of the Shoah is discussed. Fictional rep-
resentation may and does have historical underpin-
nings. However, a personal point of view, a personal
tone or attempt to grapple with the event is simulta-
neously a major consideration. As such, pitting his-
tory against fiction in the master narrative of the
Shoah may be erroneous. All attempts to come to
terms with the enormity of the Shoah are of crucial
importance. They all wrestle with these issues of
conceptualization and representation. To a certain extent, as a historical event of such
gigantic proportions, the Shoah almost inherently
dooms all attempts to grapple with it. The Shoah is
a metatext bequeathed to us and to the generations
to come. The last fifty years have seen a major at-
tempt on the part of theologians, philsophers, and
historians to come to terms with it more fully. Under
the heading "the Narrative of the Shoah," a new
discipline has emerged that grapples with the phe-
nomenon from all aspects of human epistemology: a
human quest to place a map of understanding on
the phenomenon. The liminal line between "story" and history con-
tinues to challenge all thinking on and interpreta-
tion of the phenomenology of the Shoah. The cre-
ative artistic mode, especially in literature, continues
to search for a verbal and personal narrative as a
proxy for comprehending the catastrophe. The
Shoah is the most extensive communal catastrophe
in Jewish history. Until the nineteenth century, the
Jewish response to catastrophe mostly occurred
within the traditional liturgical literature and the
Jewish canon--deep piety justifying God's judg-
ment. Shoah literature can be viewed as part of De-
struction Literature in Hebrew and Jewish litera-
ture. It is possible to trace its early appearances in
Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Daniel, and other prophet-
ic books of the Hebrew Bible. To an extent, the de-
struction of the First Temple is a model for De-
struction (Hurban) Literature. Sacred texts--from
the Bible through the Talmud, Midrash, and litur-
gy--form a continuous literature that has canonized
the verbal memory of the people. It is a code, a his-
tory rife with persecution and destruction, rein-
forced by repetitious patterns which have shaped
this literature. The collective memory is intertwined
with the personal. Events moored in history enter a
metahistorical heritage of a continuous presence of
past events. Jewish history is studded with words
and names serving as markers and signs that contin- ____________________
| | GILA RAMRAS-RAUCH is Professor of Hebrew Literature at He-
brew College in Boston. She is the author of The Arab in Israeli
Literature ( 1989 ), a monographic study of Aharon Appelfeld
novels ( 1994 ), and numerous articles on twentieth-century Israeli
and Hebrew fiction and poetry. She has reviewed contemporary
Hebrew and Yiddish works for WLT since 1969. | -493- | 
