Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (review)

S. Lillian Kremer's Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination is an extraordinary book. It conveys in rich detail the accounts of three writers who experienced the Holocaust firsthand and four who, as American Jews, powerfully explored the Holocaust through fiction. After finishing this impressive critical study, which manages to be scholarly and moving at the same time, no reader should be able to think of Holocaust literature as solely or even primarily defined by such male writers as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, significant as their writings are. Rather, Lillian Kremer has demonstrated beyond doubt that women's voices are essential to the construction of Holocaust memory; without them our understanding of Holocaust experience (to the extent that such experience can be understood) is incomplete. In delineating the achievements of each of these seven writers, Kremer draws on historical accounts and memoirs, psychoanalytic monographs, the considerable extant criticism on Holocaust literature, and interviews with the writers themselves. The result is a work itself rich in narrative, as well as in insights and analytic detail, that in one volume vastly widens the boundaries of literature of the Holocaust.

Kremer's introduction makes clear the ways in which women's Holocaust writing is distinctive. Women's narratives emphasize supportive bonds among women in ghettos and concentration camps; they focus often on children and the attempts to protect them as well as on the responses to their loss; they document physical and psychological reactions to assaults on the body; they reveal "misogyny as complementary to racism" in the Nazi universe (8). Most significantly, "[u]nlike male narratives, in which women appear as minor figures and often as helpless victims, in women-centered novels female characters are fully defined protagonists, experiencing the Shoah [the Hebrew term for the Holocaust] in all its evil manifestations" (5). The novels and stories examined portray experience in Europe before the war; life in the ghettos, in concentration camps, in hiding, and in the resistance; and accommodation to life as a survivor in the postwar era. Kremer points out differences in emphasis between the two groups of writers, with the survivors representing more fully the Holocaust experience itself while the Americans often focus on postwar lives. Their treatment of characters differs, too, within these presentations; the survivors, writes Kremer, "explore the ambiguities and ethical dilemmas confronted by victims more penetratingly than do Americans . . . [who] treat victims while in the grip of Nazis reverentially, reserving their protagonists' shortcomings for pre- and postwar episodes" (23). Nonetheless, Kremer is firm in respecting both the choice and the right of American women to explore Holocaust experience in fiction; as her subtitle insists on the validity of both memory and imagination in creating Holocaust literature, her analyses of American and survivor writings attests to the value of both in coming to terms with the nearly unfathomable, for those who experienced twentieth-century horrors as well as those who, remote from them, yet feel their effect.

The novels and stories discussed by Kremer were written throughout the period 1953-1990. But the structure of the book loosely follows the chronology of Holocaust experience represented, rather than the chronology of literary composition. The first work examined in depth, Ilona Karmel's An Estate of Memory, appeared in 1969 and focuses on the concentration camp experiences of a group of women. The last, Norma Rosen's Touching Evil, was also published in 1969, but it deals with two non-Jewish women who take on Holocaust memory while watching the televised Eichmann trial in 1961. The internal dilemmas imposed by "passing" (an experience much more common for women than for men, whose circumcisions betrayed them) are explored by several of the writers, most notably Karmel, Elzbieta Ettinger, and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Hana Demetz, in The House on Prague Street, details the "metamorphosis from assimilated Czech to despised half-caste" (101...