David Herman
Jewish Writers and the Holocaust: ‘60s and '70s
Summary
In 1959 Philip Roth published the first great piece of Jewish-American fiction about the Holocaust with his short story, “Eli, the Fanatic.” Following this came Saul Bellow’s “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” in 1969 and Cynthia Ozick’s story, “The Shawl” in 1980. Writing about the Holocaust increased greatly in the 1990s and 2000s. David Herman asks, what is the explanation for the change from silence about the Holocaust to an explosion of plays, stories and novels?
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
A great, great writer, not Jewish-American, obviously, but a Jewish-Ukrainian writer. Vasily Grossman is, indeed, a very great writer about Soviet anti-Semitism, who wrote a wonderful short story about the Holocaust. His book of short stories and essays, including arriving at Treblinka with the Red Army towards the end of the war, is called The Road, and it’s available in paperback.
That’s a very interesting point. It could be a kind of a mini genre. There’s too many genres, both related to people who either grew up in communist Russia or parents that grew up in communist Russia and their children grew up in America. For example, Keith Gessen and his sister, Masha Gessen, the journalist who writes for the New Yorker. It would be worth turning to another series on Jewish American writers, because there was such an exodus after 1991, after the fall of the Soviet regime, when it became easier for Jewish families to leave the Soviet Union, come to America, particularly a lot settled in Brooklyn.
I think the book’s even better. It really introduced Foer. An extraordinary family. His mother wrote a very powerful book about her experiences in the Holocaust. His brother, Franklin Foer, is a well-known journalist, wrote quite a controversial piece recently about the state of American Zionism.