Langer, one of our most eloquent Holocaust scholars (Admitting the
Holocaust, 1994, etc.), offers 11 essays that look mainly at the
inadequacies of art in addressing this cataclysm. The lectures and
occasional pieces collected in this new volume, written in the last
three years, deal predominantly with cultural issues, ranging from
the paintings of Samuel Bak (a survivor of the Vilna ghetto) to the
Yiddish-Polish film Undzere Kinder (Our Children), from the moral
question posed by Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower to the problem
of teaching the Holocaust. Langer, like Bak, "insists on a tension
between . . . two narratives [of Jewish history]: a positive
chronicle moving from Creation to Exodus . . . and a negative one,
beginning with round-ups and finishing with train voyages to a
perplexing abandonment and final doom." In his previous work,
Langer has offered a convincing analysis of the events of the
Holocaust as being beyond our previous categories of moral behavior
and of the recollections of the survivors as existing in their own
doubled narrative, "chronological" and "durational" time, as he
puts it. The new book restates and refines the ideas of its
predecessors, most notably Holocaust Testimonies (which won a
National Book Critics Circle award), applying that work's insights
to specific texts with incisiveness and intelligence. At a time
when the daily newspapers are filled with renewed versions of
genocide and atrocity, but also a time in which the last of the
perpetrators of the Holocaust and their victims are dying of old
age, this volume is a useful corrective to the foolish
sentimentalizing of these events or their application as a
hideously inappropriate lesson on the "triumph of the human
spirit." As Langer himself points out dryly, "the Holocaust is a
narrative without closure and with few cheerful endings." An
essential work on one of the central historical moments of this
century. (Kirkus Reviews)
Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of
the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in
literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he
examines are Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art
Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal. He appraises the art of Samuel
Bak, considered by many the premier Holocaust painter of our time,
and assesses the "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago. He also
offers a critical interpretation of Undzere Kinder, a neglected but
important Yiddish film made in Poland after the war about Holocaust
orphans. Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial
issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the
subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of
women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of
individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current
tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities,
thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic
impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and
the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for
healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of
teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and
less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity
about its human impact and psychological roots.
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