The Holocaust Short Story

Mary Catherine Mueller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367339203
• eBook ISBN: 9781000729979
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

The Holocaust Short Story is the only book devoted entirely to representations of the Holocaust in the short story genre. The book highlights how the explosiveness of the moment captured in each short story is more immediate and more intense, and therefore recreates horrifying emotional reactions for the reader. The main themes confronted in the book deal with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home, and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. The book thoroughly introduces the genres of both the short story and Holocaust writing, explaining the key features and theories in the area. Each chapter then looks at the stories in detail, including work by Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. This book is essential reading for anyone working on Holocaust literature, trauma studies, Jewish studies, Jewish literature, and the short story genre.

1

The collapse of time

Introduction to select themes of the Holocaust short story

All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.

– Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”

Upon considering the structural features of the short story and the Holocaust short story genre discussed in the “Introduction,” we shall now direct our analysis toward the three essential thematic concepts rooted in Holocaust short story narratives – particularly as seen in the writings of Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. These key concepts capture the essential way the Holocaust short story contributes to the greater Holocaust literary canon, and aids in highlighting what victims faced during the Holocaust. These themes are: the anti-world, the collapse of time, and the assault on the home (domestic spaces) and relationships. Building upon what has already been addressed regarding these ideas, the Holocaust short story inserts its readers into various degrees of the anti-world. The anti-world is the life during Hitler’s reign – Nazism, Nuremburg Laws, ghettos, hidings, Aryan papers, Stars of David, tattoos, camps, crematoriums. Short stories lend themselves to reflecting the anti-world differently than other literary genres, in which the short narratives immediately insert the reader into a scene or a moment encapsulating this world. In some of the short stories that will be discussed in the following chapters, this scene or moment begins in a domestic space, capturing the Nazis’ assault on the home – a place which once housed safety, comfort, love, provision, and warmth, which crumbles into the anti-world as the narrative progresses. The collapsing of homes followed by the separating of relationships often highlights the beginning step of the Nazis’ path to annihilation of the Jewish people, which was to render them homeless; therefore, devoid of the security, the peace, and the comfort of their once familial domestic dwelling place: their homes. Whether a young family in an apartment in Fink’s “The Key Game,” multi-generations gathered around a kitchen table in Korn’s “The Road of No Return,” or the couple in Halpern’s “Dog Blood,” survivors of the Holocaust, these domestic spaces often serve in ushering the reader into the world of the short story, in which the collapsing of time and relationships into the anti-world often occurs. The Nazi ideologies and numerous anti-Jewish measures and laws began a legal wave of annihilation that first renders Jewish people homeless before rendering them devoid of a future – as seen in these victims being moved to ghettos, concentration camps, and eventually, gas chambers. Stemming from the domestic spaces or settings of some these select stories, the height and depth of the degrees and layers of the anti-world become evident for readers when they read stories that hinge, not on a moment of time, but rather, on a moment of the collapse of time. The collapse of time seems contradictory in and of itself; nevertheless, the anti-world – all that comprised the Holocaust – was itself a contradiction of any presuppositions one might have had of a cultured, civilized society.

Instinctively, one often thinks of time in terms of scientific measurements or constants. In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries in theoretical physics and mathematics assert scientific reason concerning time and space. In 1687, Newton defined time: “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external.”¹ Various scholars have also noted the different approaches to the discussion of time. For instance, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Reinhart Koselleck explores the concept of historical time in relation to modernity (the late eighteenth century through World War I). In his work, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, Stephen Kern considers the nature of time, culture, and technology as perceived in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by various philosophers, scientists, and humanists. Kern addresses how philosophers like Kant rejected this idea of time in the absolute sense which Newton claims for it. Kern writes:

In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant rejected the Newtonian theory of absolute, objective time (because it could not possibly be experienced) and maintained that time was a subjective form or foundation of all experience. But even though it was subjective, it was also universal – the same for everybody.²

Often, human beings have a relative understanding of time, meaning that one can only comprehend time when measuring it in modes of distance (e.g. miles to the moon, meters to the post office, minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute), or when we consider time to be a metaphysical constant continuing forward on a positive trajectory into the future. This scientific notion of time resurfaced in the early 1900s, with Albert Einstein building upon Newton’s scientific and mathematical theories, when he further enlightened the world on the notion of time in his mathematical theories regarding relativity, gravity, and space. The dawn of the new century was the dawn of a new theory of time. As Kern notes:

With the special theory of relativity in 1905 Einstein calculated how time in one reference system moving away at a constant velocity appears to slow down when viewed from another system at rest relative to it, and in his general theory of relativity of 1916 he extended the theory to that of the time change of accelerated bodies. Since every bit of matter in the universe generates a gravitational force and since gravity is equivalent to acceleration, he concluded that “every reference body has its own particular time.”³

Consequently, when one thinks of time, one tends to naturally think of the future or of a counting or measuring of something – some thing, some reality, some hope in the forward and beyond. Or one thinks of systems and galaxies in motion toward, beyond, or in the midst of black holes and voids of the stratospheres. Yet while most of the scientific and mathematical world was enthralled by Einstein’s theory of time and relativity, in the small corner of Saransk, Russia, twentieth-century literary philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin sought to apply this notion of time to literary studies, introducing his idea in the essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”⁴ Bakhtin wrote this essay in order to address what he calls the “chronotope” – or space-time – a term he coins to describe the novel’s literary representation of time and of temporal and spatial relationships. Bakhtin maintains that when regarding the novel, time is not bound, constrained, or adherent to any presuppositions of time in the scientific sense, but rather it uniquely molds to the shape of the narrative which it is describing. Or as one scholar notes, “Chronotopic analysis thus seeks to address literary history at a very fundamental level; it mediates between historically created and thus changing conceptions of time and space, and their realization in the underlying narratives of literary texts.”⁵ Drawing from the writings of Goethe and Kant,⁶ Bakhtin’s philosophy of literary time and space is a twentieth-century attempt to address and challenge the scientific understanding of time when applied to literary theory. Regarding this notion he st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The features of the Holocaust short story
• 1 The collapse of time: Introduction to select themes of the Holocaust short story
• 2 The collapse of silence: The role of silence in Ida Fink’s short stories
• 3 The collapse of man – and then man created the anti-man: The role of the Muselman figure in select short stories from Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen
• 4 The collapse of relationships and home: The Nazi assault on relationships, family, and home as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories
• 5 The collapse of motherhood: Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index