This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the 'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the 'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

Those familiar with the artistic lexicon of Samuel Bak will recognize many of the symbols present in the series Figuring Out, but they will also meet and explore a new cast of characters. Human figures in many guises navigate a search for identity in the postwar world and invite the audience into a dialogue about the future of mankind. The human face appears in various states—from flesh to stone, in wooden profile, or as a gigantic monument slowly sinking into the earth—but always in some way eroded, defaced, masked, blindfolded, bandaged, or distorted. Human figures inhabit a ravaged landscape but collaboratively and resolutely drag each other out of their wounded past in their determined journey toward an uncertain future. New to Bak’s drama of identity is the figure of the magician, a master of manipulation who drifts between the whimsical and the grim. With this latest body of work, Bak steadfastly proves the important role of the artist in understanding the human experience and confronting difficult episodes in the history of our time. As author Lawrence L. Langer writes: "We are beholding a mute autopsy of the human journey, invited to become artists of the imagination ourselves as the only way of joining this arduous excursion into the meaning of our current existence." In his essay, Langer demonstrates his mastery of Holocaust history and his clear understanding of Bak’s visual language, deftly guiding us through the complex ambiguities of the work. He offers ways of seeing beyond mere looking, noticing and expanding upon both broad themes and seemingly inconsequential details. In his essay, art historian Andrew Meyers places Bak’s figures in context with historical approaches to the genre, then thematically classifies Bak’s multivalent approaches to the subject in a nuanced continuum. Together, the artist and authors of Figuring Out turn the question of "Who am I?" into a question of "Who are we?"—preparing the viewer and reader to pick up the mantle of this inquiry.

The Samuel Bak Gallery and Learning Center in Loving Memory of Hope Silber Kaplan at the Holocaust Museum Houston is a destination for a richly diverse general public, the country's academic community, and Holocaust scholars from around the world. Bak's legacy at HMH is demonstrated through 125 incredibly complex, memory-inciting, and dramatically hued paintings, generously donated to the museum by the artist. The collection contains early paintings he made as a child prodigy in the Vilna Ghetto, works created throughout his early career, and paintings from the twenty-first century. Pears, landscapes, dice, candles, religious iconography, letters of the Hebrew alphabet, musicians, cups, faces and figures, books, buildings, ships, objects so often broken and in disrepair. Through these symbols, Bak paints into being eternal questions about life, loss, love, identity, repair, and responsibility. Viewers grapple with the dilemmas of fathoming the past and making sense of life in the complex world we share. In this publication, which accompanies the exhibit, Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer unpacks and gives context to Bak's dense visual vocabulary. An extensive interview with the artist discusses his process and speaks specifically about each work in the collection.

The memoir of Charlotte Delbo, a French writer sent to Auschwitz for her resistance activities against the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Charlotte Delbo's moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar trauma of survivors, Auschwitz and After, is now a classic of Holocaust literature. Offering the rare perspective of a non-Jew, Delbo records moments of horror and of desperate efforts at mutual support, of the everyday deprivation and abuse experienced by everyone in the camps, and especially by children. Auschwitz and After conveys how a survivor must "carry the word" and continue to live after surviving one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. "No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental."-Geoffrey Hartman "I find Rosette C. Lamont's remarkable translation of Charlotte Delbo's work perceptive, delicate, and poignant, in short: exceptional."-Elie Wiesel "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo's meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the 'afterdeath' of the Holocaust. Delbo's powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award

In the art of Samuel Bak, familiar objects fracture before our eyes, abandoning their traditional functions to become metaphors for a dissonant, broken world. Inhabitants of a surrealistic space, Bak's candles are abused, damaged, melting, lifeless, and bathed in the somber afterglow of profound sorrow. The cylindrical candles morph into tree trunks, logs, chimneys, columns, missiles, and other projectiles, exposing the frequent disorder at the heart of the supposed orderly progression of history. An icon of memory becomes a ruse, where the flames of remembrance mingle with the drifting smoke of extermination. Amidst the anguish of his paintings, however, Bak allows for the notion that life can rise anew from the ashes. In his enlightening essay, Lawrence L. Langer guides us through the ritual of remembering the Holocaust through Bak's paintings, familiarizing the viewer with a past that may feel abstract to many of us. While Bak's paintings provide an entry point into the reality of the Shoah that our modern consciousness struggles to confront, Langer's words explicate the historical, religious, and cultural narratives that inform the artwork.

Showcases the distinctive work of one of the most innovative artists of our time. Samuel Bak's most recent series of paintings, "New Perceptions of Old Appearances", is a tribute to the power of the metaphorical imagination. Using the pear as a substitute image for the familiar apple of Eden, Bak explores the struggle of modern civilization to wrest from our fragile universe a viable mode of communal existence. Bak's pears are stoic in their solidity, but vulnerable to decay. In some guises they shine with the beauty of succulent fruit, but in others they fall victim to the violence of history and the decay of time. In this book - filled with color illustrations - Lawrence L. Langer shows the versatility and uniqueness of Bak's art. His pears play many roles, challenging the viewer to interpret their enigmatic presences without having to search for a single dogmatic meaning. While some, laden with promise, proclaim the inherent dignity of artistic form, others remind us, as they are consumed by fire or sacrificed on strange altars, of what Bak has called the ""ineffaceable tragedy and sadness"" that has been part of our lot as human creatures during the past hundred years. His images are both ripe with life and haunted by death. Samuel Bak had his first exhibition at the age of nine in the Vilna Ghetto. After emigrating to Israel, he studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums in the United States, Israel, and Europe. Books about his work include ""Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak"" and ""The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak"". Lawrence L. Langer is Alumnae Chair Professor of English Emeritus at Simmons College. His publications include ""The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination"", ""Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory"", ""Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology"", and ""Preempting the Holocaust"".

In Pucker Art Publications' twelfth book on the art of Samuel Bak, the artist collaborates with Lawrence L. Langer to explore the book of Genesis, the search for identity, and that first couple: Adam and Eve. Bak's 120 paintings depicting the couple as travellers, Renaissance-era and twentieth-century lost souls, are rich in symbolism, posing questions of good and evil and of how we are to repair the world. Langer effectively and intelligently analyses and provides insight into the paintings' meanings and allusions.

The three works considered in Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov display a striking overlap in their concern with hierarchy and mutuality as parallel and often intersecting way of how human beings relate to each other and to divine forces in the universe. All three contain adversarial protagonists whose stature often commands admiration from audiences less ready to confront their motives and deeds than to be swayed by their verbal harangues. Why the quest for personal power should disturb the serenity of mutual love with such compelling force is an issue that Milton, Melville and Dostoevsky address with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In their texts the seeds of disaster seem to sprout in both spiritual and barren soil, sometimes nurtured by a hierarchy that gave them birth, at others in reaction against a hierarchy that would stifle their energy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the origins and the consequences of such tensions.

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.

The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement. "The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle." -The New Republic

Samuel Bak's recent collection considers the hidden dialogue of generations, with the secret entanglement of different ages. It is indeed a playful cycle, whose playfulness, and even parody, becomes apparent to the beholder literate in Jewish memory and religious imagination. Bak's images are replete with allusions, citations, intimate references, playing with themes that are as intuitive as they are rooted in Jewish learning and tradition. In his illuminating essay, Lawrence Langer reminds us that Bak thinks of his work as 'learned paintings' disclosing themselves, like sacred texts, in layers of meaning corresponding to the layers of learning. Langer beautifully unravels some of their themes, taking us through the worlds of Torah and Chassidism, to the 'elsewhere' of the modern age."-Asher D. Biemann, professor of religious studies, University of Virginia

In his latest series of paintings featuring images of cups, Samuel Bak proves once again that he is a master of the collapsing visual metaphor. His images do not vanish from the canvas, but they lose their integrity, groping for a form that will enable them to retain some semblance of their original shapes. Often set against a background of mountainous or other natural terrain, these damaged images offer a disturbing contrast to the indifference of most of the landscapes they inhabit. In the few cases where human figures appear, they seem displaced, sad, burdened, struggling vainly to establish some control over the disarray that assaults them. Bak's art and the questions he raises are important for viewers today because he is overtly concerned with matters both of his own personal experience and those of the larger human condition. His work preserves the memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit.

This book is a tribute to the artist's return to his birthplace, to the place of his childhood, once filled with happiness; to the streets of his tenuous survival during World War II, and to the memorial for his grandparents and father. Bak's journey was marked by memories and profound sadness and a great awareness of his responsibility to express the spirits of all who were destroyed during the Holocaust. Scholar Lawrence L. Langer provides commentary on the rich symbolic significance and uniqueness of the artist's work.

In Admitting the Holocaust Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. A respected Holocaust scholar, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.