Sue Vice

A Poetics of the North: Visual and Literary Geographies

In this chapter we explore different media in our approaches to the North, including a pair of linked television plays presented under the title The Price of Coal (Ken Loach, 1977), written by Barry Hines; these are alongside two literary texts, Philip Hensher’s 2008 novel, A Northern Clemency, and David Peace’s GB84 of 2004. We argue that a dynamic poetics of the North emerges as both an aesthetic trend and a critical tool when viewed within such cross-medium understandings of region. The notion of a poetics of the North might appear to be a contradictory one, given critical assumptions about the region’s associations with a realist form and its accompanying bleak social and political content. However, as Katherine Cockin has argued, the North ‘generates oxymoron or paradox, a tension between desolation and depth, defying the literal and logical and intimating the poetic powers of the unconscious’ (Cockin, 2012: 5–6). Here, we use the apparently archetypal examples of television drama and fiction, which centre on representations of the mining industry in the South Yorkshire region in order to argue against such a polarised view.

‘It'll make ashenblotty of the seating-plan!' British-Jewishness in Jack Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy

This article argues that the work of Jack Rosenthal, the television dramatist, has been unaccountably excluded from the canon of British-Jewish writing. A comparison of two different versions of his 1976 television play Bar Mitzvab Boy—which was turned into musicals in both Britain and the US—shows how innovative Rosenthals aesthetic practice is in representing Jewish characters. The success of the television play is due to its reliance on a hybrid of British and Jewish discourses, rather than setting these against each other (as in the case of the British musical) or merging them (in the American musical).

Children’s Voices and Viewpoints in Holocaust Literature

In this essay I will discuss some examples of Holocaust writing by, or about, Jewish children during the Holocaust years. These two categories consist respectively of contemporary material written by children, including diaries and testimony or memoirs by adult survivors looking back at their childhood selves; and fiction. In the latter, literary and narrative techniques used to convey children’s experience are very varied and are often designed to present what is distinctive about a child’s viewpoint. Both kinds of text, contemporary and retrospective, may include such elements as misunderstanding, gaps in memory and varieties of irony, but, I will argue, do not – and indeed cannot – include any representation or sample of a child’s own language or voice.

‘Beyond words’: representing the ‘Holocaust by bullets’

ABSTRACT This article considers the reasons for the paucity, by contrast to the literature of the wartime ghettos and camps, of cultural representations of the Einsatzgruppen murders. It does so by analysing those representations that do exist, in the form of memoirs, poetry and fiction by eyewitnesses and survivors, as well as a diary kept by a bystander to these mass shootings. The article concludes by asking whether very nature of these murders means that they are all but unrepresentable.

Grandma’s House and the Charms of the Petit Bourgeoisie

This chapter asks whether the lower-middle-class setting of Simon Amstell’s BBC series Grandma’s House (2010/12) has a more central significance for its plot and aesthetics than is usually acknowledged. Such a formation, defined by Marx as ‘hovering’ between the proletariat and the middle class, is represented ambivalently throughout. The self-reflexive nature of a drama whose star plays a version of himself is inextricable from its class dimension, since it reveals the indispensability of the playwright protagonist Simon’s family to his acquisition of a more elevated social standing. Yet such a status is undercut by the drama’s choice not to portray in negative terms the customary features of lower-middle-class life, such as propriety, aspiration and shame. Rather, Simon’s family, and the mise en scene in terms of which its members are represented, surpasses the bland compromises of the middle-class characters.

Screening South Yorkshire: The Gamekeeper and Looks and Smiles

In Barry Hines’s final two films with Ken Loach, The Gamekeeper (1980) and Looks and Smiles (1981), the spaces of South Yorkshire, photographed by Chris Menges, are constructed with what seem to be the social-realist or even documentary techniques of long shots of rural and urban landscapes alternating with close-ups, filmed using natural lighting and black-and-white footage respectively. Yet the intertwining of thematic and regional concerns in these films is artfully constructed to symbolic effect, acknowledging the specificity of South Yorkshire’s history and landscape in the act of using it to reveal injustice in a broader sense. This chapter explores these key works primarily through the lens of Hines’s authorship, drawing on archival material to make the case for the writer’s distinctive approach to northern place.

British representations of the camps

ABSTRACT This article analyses how the topography of various kinds of wartime camp are represented in British narratives. It does so in order to explore whether a specifically British experience or viewpoint is evident in these texts. The camps under discussion include the internment camps, established from 1940 onwards on British soil for the incarceration of ‘enemy aliens’, and their representation in wartime memoirs and novels as well as in more recent fiction. The second category of camp to be analysed is that of the necessarily fictional deportation camp, imagined in recent novels to have been established in a Britain which has either been invaded or surrendered in 1940. Lastly, the terrain of the forced-labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz has appeared in recent British fiction in a way that draws on documentary sources by means of an anglophone perspective. The article concludes by observing that, in each case, what might have seemed to be a comparison, drawing likenesses between the real or imagined British camp and those of occupied Europe, turns out rather to be a stark literary and moral contrast.

Inventing the eyewitness: Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë

In this article, I analyse the work of two writers who have been presented as if they were the eyewitnesses to war and historical calamity, namely the poetry of Araki Yasusada, about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the short stories of the Albanian writer Jiri Kajanë, about the last years of Enver Hoxhas Cold-War-era dictatorship. Neither writer actually exists: their work was composed by those named as their translators. In each case, the eagerness with which the work was received under its false attribution lays bare the high literary value accorded to testimonial works, and the incorporation of life-writing, here in the form of elaborately invented biographies and the insistence on a link between author and text, into war-writing. In this way, satire is directed at current literary priorities in the same act that enabled the work of little-known American writers to be published under pseudonyms. For good measure, each implies criticism of US foreign policy through the representation of past atrocities.

Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain

Several of the articles gathered in this special issue are based on papers presented at the symposium on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’ held at and generously funded by the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism on 11 September 2013, and co-convened by the editors together with the Institute’s director, David Feldman. Others have been especially commissioned for the issue. Thanks are also due to Jan Davison, Jonathan Magonet and Jenny Pizer.

‘Becoming English’: assimilation and its discontents in contemporary British-Jewish literature

This article argues that twenty-first century cultural representations of British-Jewish life are, on the one hand, various, popular and successful, and, on the other, defensive and apologetic to the extent that they are liable to offer readers and viewers literal and aesthetic translations of the detail of Jewish culture. It explores the workings of such a process in relation to a variety of recent texts about contemporary and wartime British-Jewish life, including Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question, Mike Leigh’s play Two Thousand Years, Robert Popper’s television series Friday Night Dinner, and fiction by Andrew Sanger, Naomi Alderman, Charlotte Mendelson and Natasha Solomons.