NonFiction

"The Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish communities of Europe placed Jewish families under tremendous strain. In their efforts to survive and to resist the Nazi threat, relations between family members changed, upsetting gender roles and power positions between mothers and fathers, parents and children. The survivors of the Holocaust, or Shoah, were primarily young adults whose formative years were spent in the grotesque world created by the Nazis. The selections and the inhumane conditions of the slave labor camps ensured that most of the concentration camp survivors would be between the ages of 18 and 45 at the war's end, (1) though some children and older adults survived the war years outside the camps--in hiding, passing as Aryans, or as refugees in the Soviet Union. Virtually all the survivors faced the world without grandparents, parents or older siblings. For the majority, their adolescence had been interrupted, depriving them of the opportunity to experiment with gender roles and courtship within the safety of their communities and families. It was these survivors who reestablished Jewish families in the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe and abroad. It was they who most intimately came to terms with the meanings of Jewish motherhood and fatherhood after Auschwitz."

In this paper I show that, from a philosophical perspective, in Elie Wiesel's work in general and in Night in particular, the relation between ethics and religion is based on complementarity. In order to achieve this, I have analysed the way in which memory is shown as an invitation to participation in a common set of meanings, values and actions. What I deem most significant is the way in which the memory of the Holocaust is constituted as a medium of action and of communion among humans in an act of mutual responsibility. Through this, the memory of the Holocaust obliges us to assume an ethics of responsibility and of action that rules out the possibility of a contemporary repetition of the events that took place in the death camps. I use Night to show how this narrative reveals several points that are important for understanding certain aspects of the relation between ethics, religion and the memory of the Holocaust. One of these is the understanding of memory as a way to bring man and God together in a relation of mutual communication, beginning with the experience of suffering of dehumanization and of God's absence from the death camp. Another is that the religious and cultural memory represented by Israel is the main target of extermination as a manifestation of radical evil. A third is that Israel's suffering has a paradigmatic value, and therefore the memory of the Holocaust becomes a special power that may be used as a tool to diminish the power of evil through the elimination of indifference and the assumption of responsibility.

This article challenges the widespread scholarly assumption that the term Muselmann, ubiquitous in Holocaust survivor accounts, denotes a fixed, silent, concentration-camp "type" of prisoner who, nearest to death, was fated to die. Rather, based on evidence from a range of oral testimonies and firsthand accounts, I show that by contrast, Muselmanner did not enter into a new ontological category or a different species. Rather, "Muselmannhood" was, surprisingly, a temporary condition for many who claimed to have been Muselmanner and yet survived. This implies that they were similar to other prisoners in kind, differing rather in degree, along a broad continuum of deprivation, starvation, and proximity to death. Their routinely designated status as ultimate "others" thus reflects a strategy among the living to fend off approaching death, and a renunciation of human solidarity that brought survivors great shame. Given this new, more fluid sense of the term, I link literary figurations of the Muselmann to other "death-in-life" metaphors in memoirs by Charlotte Delbo, Elie Wiesel, and Ruth Kluger, who struggle to translate the quotidian extremity of death-in-life without resorting to specious euphemism. These writers invoke the Muselmann as their own shadowy Auschwitz double, a mirror of the self-that-died for the self-that-lived, an "impossible metaphor" that yields meaning precisely through dissimilarity. This study contributes to Holocaust Studies an ethical mode of reading the Muselmann among a newly assembled constellation of such impossible metaphors. These failed comparisons, which demand our witness in the form of active interpretation, I argue, mark the "aesthetics of survival" as efforts to translate, however imperfectly, the impossibility of "surviving"--only half-alive, part victim, part witness, even part collaborator--a place from where, as Delbo puts it, "None of us was meant to return."

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached (trans. Edward Gauvin, 2012), We are on our Own by Miriam Katin (2006), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (trans. Anjali Singh, 2004). Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with the identity crises caused by war.

Presents literary criticism of the books "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs, "I, Rigoberta Menchú" by Rigoberta Menchú, and "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" by Marjane Satrapi. The authors discuss these works, all autobiographies, in light of the theme of girls in need of rescue in colonial histories. The authors address themes of race, girlhood, transnationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism in the texts in light of feminist studies.

The article analyzes the rhetorical presentation of cultural, national, religious and personal identity negotiations in the books "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" and "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return," by Marjane Satrapi. Readers were urged to examine their Western identity and perspective on Iranian identity in the identity negotiation portrayal. Satrapi left Iran after the 1978-1979 Revolution as a 14-year-old. Religion and politics were separated by Satrapi in her personal domain.

In Iran, even laughter is considered sinful by the nation’s strict Shiite regime. Yet after revolution and war, Iranians cherish hopes of a freer future. This program describes the impact of life in a modern fundamentalist society on Iran’s diverse population, which includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It also spotlights the joyful celebration of Sizdah Bedar, which welcomes the spring; the incomparable Iranian crown jewels; monuments such as the magnificent palace of Shah Abas the First, the huge Imam Mosque, the ruins of Persepolis, and the wind towers of Nain; and the lifestyles of artisans, craftspeople, laborers, and students. (49 minutes)

Virginia Woolf's phrase, 'a room of one's own' has long since passed into popular parlance. Coined in response to talks requested by the women students of Newnham and Girton colleges in Cambridge on women and writing, Woolf's prescient phrase highlights an increasing awareness of the importance of spatial privacy to modern women and, in particular, to aspiring women writers. Yet there is nothing new about the idea of privacy for women. Though women through the centuries have not always enjoyed rooms of their own, they have had recourse to mental privacy, retreating to the internal spaces of their minds for refuge or silent critique. Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted with reference to Frances Burney's Evelina and Jane Austen's novels that privacy for women is often located in the internal spaces of silences snatched in the midst of more sociable moments or in the space that reading provides. As we move into the early twentieth century however, the terms of reference begin to shift. Where Austen's heroines understood 'that privacy [did] not altogether depend on physical situation' and located privacy instead within the inner and inviolable space of the mind, by the early twentieth century the demands from women were for rooms of their own, for physical privacy to accompany mental privacy. (1) Inner space was no longer entirely sufficient for female privacy. Sally Alexander, in considering the impulse expressed by diverse women in the twenties for rooms of their own, writes of this desire as a desire for inner space, 'a state of mind' to transform self and society. (2) I wish to argue however that it is not the push for inner space that is new but the asking for physical space to accompany the inner space of refuge. There needs to be physical solitude to make privacy complete.