Imagining the Unimaginable: Holocaust Memory Transmission and the Representation of the Holocaust in Jewish-American Holocaust Fiction

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2015-08-26

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en

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While studies on the representation of the Holocaust in American literature generally focus on first-, second-, and third-generation Holocaust literature, literary contributions of American authors who lack personal experience of the Holocaust but who nonetheless wrote their fiction alongside the survivor generation are rarely included. This thesis re-categorizes Jewish-American Holocaust authors based on their temporal distance to the Holocaust, examines how these categories of authors employ the Holocaust within their fiction through an analysis of three Jewish-American novels, and considers what external sources have influenced these representations, paying special attention to America’s cultural Holocaust memory. Such an analysis explores the reciprocity between Holocaust literature and cultural Holocaust memory, by revealing how Holocaust literature simultaneously relies on, and helps in the formation of, a soci! ety’s c ultural Holocaust memory. Keywords: Jewish-American Holocaust literature / Jessica Lang / cultural memory / Holocaust memory transmission / Thane Rosenbaum / Richard Zimler / Leon Uris

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Faculteit der Letteren