Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos

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

Rose, Sven-Erik

Paperback

Series: Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry

Literary CriticismGeneral World HistoryHolocaust

ISBN10: 168458275X
ISBN13: 9781684582754
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: Jun 18 2025
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.50
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.98
Language: English

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.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All