Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos

Sven-Erik Rose

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781684582754, 9781684582730
• eBook ISBN: 9781684582747
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: Literature

A study of literature written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos emphasizes how authors processed their horrific experiences through poetry and prose.

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This is the first study devoted to how little known but essential authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the gothic horror tale. Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose's readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction
• I. Novel
• II. Poetry: Three Poems from the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942
• III. Short Prose: One: Self-Writing in the Warsaw Ghetto
• IV. Short Prose: Two: Revisiting Popular Literary Genres in the Lodz and Vilna Ghettos
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index