Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Between Identity and Anonymity: Art and History in Aharon Megged's Foiglman

In a recent article, “Israeli Literature Over Time,”Aharon Megged describes his work as “unremittingly concerned with burning national issues,” mainly with the issue of Israel′s relationship to the Diaspora.1 Megged′s intense preoccupation with the Zionist ideology of the negation of the Diaspora emerged in his 1955 story “Yad va-shem” (“The Name”). The story presents a scathing criticism of Israel′s dissociation from the history of the Diaspora and especially from the catastrophe of the Holocaust. “Yad va-shem” was followed by an article entitled “Tarbutenu ha-yeshana ve-ha-hadasha” (“Our Old and New Culture”) in which Megged deplored Israel′s severance of its Diaspora roots and urged a reexamination of the negative attitude toward the destroyed European Jewish culture.In 1984, Megged published Massa ha-yeladim el ha-aretz ha-muvtachat (“The Childrens Journey”), a novel based on a true story about a group of young survivors of the Holocaust on their way to Palestine.3 This work, as Dan Laor notes in his review, “offers a perspective of the Diaspora in the Holocaust which differs from [the typical Israeli attitude of] contempt infused with pity” toward the Diaspora Jew.

Edith Stein: a reading of her feminist thought

Rachel Feldhay Brenner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53105. This article was completed with the assistance of a Canada Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. [The woman] craves for an unhampered development of her personality just as much as she does to help another toward the same goal. -Edith Stein

A. M. Klein and Mordecai Richler: The poetics of the search for Providence in the post-Holocaust world

Rachel Feldhay Brenner teaches at York University; this article was completed during her SSHRCC Postdoctoral Fellowship which she currently holds at the Centre for Religious Studies, University of Toronto. In his famous opening lines to Paradise Lost, John Milton spells out his poem’s monumental undertaking to &dquo;assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.&dquo;’ The poet, assuming the role of one who

The Final Solution in Early Polish Testimonial Fiction: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Witnessing World

While early Jewish literary testimonies of the Holocaust have received a remarkable amount of critical attention, very little has been said about the early literary responses of the Poles, the closest witnesses to the disaster. The location of the Holocaust, which took place mainly on the Polish territory, placed the Poles between the victims and the perpetrators. As the testimonial literature studied here shows, the borderline witnessing situation produced an emotional and ethical crisis, because the reality of the Final Solution put to test the humanistic fortitude of the writers. This paper examines the impact of the Jewish plight in literary testimonies in Józef Mackiewiczs ‘Ponary – “Baza”’ (1945), which records the liquidation of a transport of Jews in Ponary, Tadeusz Borowskis ‘This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ (1946), which describes a transport of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a narrative composed of three 1947 stories,‘The Landscape that Survived Death’, ‘Victory’, and ‘Returned Kindness’ of three stories by Kornel Filipowicz, which depict the Jewish search to survive. These first person testimonials focus on the narrators’ response of emotional numbness and moral compromise. The concreteness of the Final Solution dehumanized not only the perpetrators and the victims; the bestiality of the former and the degradation of the latter affected the humanity of the witnesses because their disengagement from the victims signified acquiescence with the genocidal scheme of the German executioners. The testimonial narratives attest to the narrators’ twofold objective to recount the reality that they witnessed and to examine its effect on their psyche. Whereas the testimonial component of the texts demonstrates the narrators’ sense of obligation to record the facts, the literary component of confession communicates the need to reckon with the effects of discontent, shame and guilt of the wartime experience. The humanistic aspect of the stories lies in their narrators’ recognition of their emotional detachment from the victims as emotional failure and ethical transgression.

Lillian Kremer. Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xi, 278 pp.

Kremers recent book is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship devoted to literary responses to the Holocaust. Womens Holocaust Writing joins studies such as Edward Alexanders The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature, Lawrence Langers The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Alvin Rosenfelds A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, Alan Bergers Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, his more recent Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, Sarah Horowitzs Voicing the Void, and Kremers previous study Witness through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature.

Teaching the Holocaust

In his 1982 article ‘Academia and the Holocaust’, which discusses the importance of ethics in university education, Alan Berger makes a poignant observation: ‘Ideally, education is training in human potential and responsibility… Practically speaking, the question is: What is the relationship between teaching and being human?… The dissonance between what is taught and the world we live in seems overwhelming.’1

``Unsealing' the Letters': The Making of an Artist in David Grossman's The Book of Internal Grammar

Abstract The writings of David Grossman (b. 1954) have become important landmarks on the Israeli cultural landscape. His journalistic works, The Yellow Wind (1987) and Present Absentees (1992), have contributed significantly to the public debate between right- and left-wing proponents over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Grossmans novels are striking literary attempts to explore controversial issues that lie at the core of Israels existence. The Smile of the Lamb (1983) probes moral and philosophical predicaments as they arise from the Arab-Israeli conflict. His next novel, See: Under Love (1986), examines a fundamental issue in Israels reality, making an ambitious attempt to confront the Holocaust memory and to assess its impact upon Israeli consciousness. Grossmans latest work, The Book of Internal Grammar (1991), is no exception. As with the writers previous works, this novel has generated wide public interest and a plethora of critical responses—a circumstance arising from its subject matter, l...

Reflections of/on Zionism in Recent Hebrew Fiction: Aharon Megged's Foiglman and Ruth Almog's Dangling Roots

Rachel Feldhay Brenner is an Assistant Professor in the Hebrew and Semitic Studies Department at the University ofWisconsin-Madison, where she teaches Modern Hebrew Literature. She has published Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richlers Writing (Peter Lang, 1989) and A. M. Klein, The Father of Canadian jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion (Mellen, 1990), as well as numerous articles on the representations of the Holocaust in Jewish Canadian and in Israeli literatures. She has completed a manuscript on intellectual responses to the Holocaust and is now at work on a study of the artists self-representations in Modern Hebrew Literature.

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature Michael Greenstein Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989. viii + 232 p

important certes parmi d’autres de cet espace symbolique. I1 en est de meme de la communion, meme si ce rite est le plus significatif dans la dynamique eucharistique. Une deuxième remarque a trait aux considerations critiques que l’auteur apporte,4 la fin de chaque partie du dossier. On aurait souhaite plus d’audace dans 1’interpretation et plus de sensibilit6 ~ 1’experience contemporaine de 1’eucharistie et de la p6nitence. On sent parfois 1’enfermement dans un certain juridisme sacramentel. Ces deux remarques n’enlèvent rien a la qualite de 1’ensemble de ce dossier. j’espère que ce livre contribuera a faire progresser la r6flexion th6ologique et surtout a susciter une certaine intelligence dans les pratiques sacramentelles.