Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos
Book talk by Sven-Erik Rose, Davis, CA

In this book talk, author Sven-Erik Rose will speak about his study of literature written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos. His book attends to how authors processed their horrific experiences through poetry and prose.

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 Nazi 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.