Kirjahaku

In this first critical study of the French-language poetry written in Nazi prisons, transit camps, and concentration camps, Gary D. Mole demonstrates how this poetry cannot simply be treated with reverence or as incidental historical documentation. Situating the poetry within the wider context of concentration camp culture, Mole engages in aesthetic and moral issues, offers extensive thematic readings - both of the reality transcribed by the poets and of spiritual and religious resistance to dehumanization - and submits the poetry to a stylistic and linguistic analysis under the joint rubric of memory and innovation. Lucidly written, this interdisciplinary book makes accessible to the specialist and nonspecialist reader an unjustly neglected corpus and argues persuasively for its reinsertion into the continuing process of the memorialization of the Nazi deportation from France.

In this groundbreaking study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah, Gary D. Mole engages with an extensive corpus of poetry by more than forty poets, all of whom were active after the war in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Quebec but who came originally from Eastern Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Some were adolescents or adults during the war, either in hiding, interned or deported, first-hand witnesses to the Nazi persecution of European Jews. Others were hidden children, survivors writing of their buried traumatic experiences many years later. And a second-generation born after the war became postmemory proxy witnesses. Broadly chronological in approach, the book places the poetry in its various social, political, and historical contexts, underlines the specific geographical locations of the authors, and offers close thematic, formal, stylistic, and linguistic readings of the selected texts, highlighting some of the major aesthetic and ethical problems raised. Lucidly written, this book throws critical light, for scholars and nonspecialists, on a rich and unjustly neglected corpus, arguing convincingly for its inclusion in current debates on French-language literary representations of the Shoah and more widely in what is commonly referred to as "Holocaust Poetry." "Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence is a comprehensive, lucid, and erudite study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Holocaust. Unlike the work of English-language Holocaust poets, French-language verse has been until now largely ignored. By ensuring that Francophone Jewish poets are finally heard, Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence constitutes an important scholarly intervention in the study of Holocaust literature." —Helena Duffy, Professor of French, University of Wroclaw, Poland "An astonishing, comparative, comprehensive, and powerful scan of the various forms of poetic writing in French about the Shoah, never presented in this scope before, by authors belonging to a large variety of national and cultural backgrounds, providing the foundation of texts to be considered in future scholarship on poetry of the Shoah in other languages." —Thomas Nolden, Professor of Comparative Literary Studies, Wellesley College, Mass