Poesis in Extremis: Literature Witnessing the Holocaust

(Hardback)

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How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of truth in fiction and fiction as truth, with Wiesels French literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative book explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature in order to ask to what extent poetry and fiction can serve as testimony and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of poesis in extremis when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers.

Author Bio

Daniel Feldman is Senior Lecturer of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, with a focus on Holocaust literature and childrens literature. His scholarship has been recognized with the Childrens Literature Association Honor Article and the Childrens Literature Association Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Honor Award. His research has appeared in Comparative Literature, Partial Answers, Childrens Literature in Education, Childrens Literature, Lion and the Unicorn, and Childrens Literature Association Quarterly. Efraim Sicher is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is author of The Holocaust Novel (2005) and editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on Holocaust Novelists (2004). His most recent books are The Jews Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative (2017), Re-envisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Israeli and Diaspora Culture (2021), and Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: Negotiating Identities and Spaces (2022).