Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz

The first multidisciplinary study of its kind, Breaking Crystal examines how members of the generation after the Holocaust in Israel and the United States confront through their own imaginations a traumatic event they have not directly experienced. Among the questions this groundbreaking work raises are: Whose memory is it? What will the collective memory of the Holocaust be in the twenty-first century, after the last survivors have given testimony? How in the aftermath of the Holocaust do we read and write literature and history? How is the memory inscribed in film and art? Is the appropriation of the Holocaust to political agendas a desecration of the six million Jews? What will the children of survivors pass on to the next generation?

A controversial study of the post-Holocaust generation
The first multidisciplinary study of its kind, Breaking Crystal examines how members of the post-Holocaust generation in Israel and the United States confront through their own imagination a traumatic event they have not directly experienced. Among the questions this groundbreaking work raises are: Whose memory is it? What will the collective memory of the Holocaust be in the twenty-first century, after the last survivors have given testimony? How in the aftermath of the Holocaust do we read and write literature and history? How is the memory inscribed in film and art? Is the appropriation of the Holocaust to political agendas desecration of the six million? What will the children of survivors pass on to the next generation? An international group of leading scholars offers new insights into the most controversial questions in literary theory and education today in this innovative collection, sure to be of interest to scholars in history, literature, cultural studies, psychology, film, and Jewish studies. For eveyone struggling to understandfor everyone who knows we must never forget. EFRAIM SICHER, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, is the author of Beyond Marginality: Anglo-Jewish Literature after the Holocaust. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- JANUARY 376 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 17 photographs. Cloth, ISBN 0-252-02280-7. $49.95x Paper, ISBN 0-252-06656-1. $24.95 HOLOCAUST STUDIES / CULTURAL STUDIES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents Introduction Efraim Sicher Part 1: Here and There The Burden of Memory: The Writing of the Post-Holocaust Generation Efraim Sicher Part 2: The View from Israel Transgenerational Aftereffects of the Holocaust in Israel: Three Generations Dan Bar-On The Formation of Holocaust Consciousness in the State of Israel:The Early Days Hanna Yablonka Personal Fears and National Nightmares: The Holocaust Complex in Israeli Cinema Ilan Avisar Inherited Fear: Second-Generation Poets and Novelists in Israel Hanna Yaoz Holocaust Trauma in the Second Generation: The Hebrew Fiction of David Grossman and Savyon Liebrecht Leon I. Yudkin Part 3: The View from the Diaspora Transmission of Memory: The Post-Holocaust Generation in the Diaspora Ellen S. Fine Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation Stephen C. Feinstein Bearing Witness: Theological Implications of Second-Generation Literature in America Alan L. Berger Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of Second-Generation Aesthetics Sara R. Horowitz Part 4: Between Memory and History The Holocaust in the Postmodernist Era Efraim Sicher Acknowledging the Holocaust in Contemporary American Fiction and Criticism Emily Miller Budick Afterword: The Shoah between Memory and History Saul Friedländer ----------------------------------------------------------------------------