This Special Session will examine how contemporary, Third Generation writers from France, America and Australia represent the Holocaust in a range of works comparing perspectives from a variety of texts. Questions to be addressed will begin with how the authors of New Jewish Fiction confront the burden of inheritance when defining the Holocaust and what happens when “constructive distance” intervenes in the representation of Holocaust experiences. How perceptions of the Holocaust have altered in Third Generation writers with limited direct knowledge of survivors will be of prime concern – and if fiction has replaced memory (as well as history) in the construction of new Holocaust writing. Additionally, has the literary marketplace shaped how writers respond to the re-construction of Holocaust experiences? And has Holocaust writing compensated for the loss of direct knowledge by becoming more inventive and intense because these writers begin with a void, lacking the immediacy of their parents’ or grandparent’s tales of first-hand experience? As Third Generation writers, the authors grew up without a repository of stories and must invent (as M. Chabon did in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) but with still an obligation to protect the facts. With remembrance frustrated, fiction comes forward. The quest of Third Generation writers is not so much to recreate as to re-invent. The Special Session extends the work of Erika Dreifus’s “Ever After? History, Healing and ‘Holocaust Fiction’ in the Third Generation” (2005) and her “Looking Backward: Third-Generation Fiction Writers and the Holocaust” (2011), plus The Holocaust: Lessons for the Third Generation, ed. Domnick A.Iorio et al (1997), Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory, Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012) and Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger’s Third Generation Holocaust Representation (2017).

Hilene Flanzbaum will begin by addressing how two French novels (Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise [2006] and Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key [2006]) confront the issue of collaboration. To what extent do these texts mark the French acceptance of their own complicity in the murder of one-third of their Jewish population in WWII? Ira Nadel will examine the treatment of the Holocaust in popular fiction noting, first, the worldwide success of W. Styron's Sophie's Choice and Will Schlink's The Reader before focusing on the New Zealand/Australian writer Heather Morris and her international hit The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018). What alters in the popular treatment of the Holocaust when written for commercial purposes and how does fiction alter fact since actual events in Auschwitz formed the basis of the novel? Holli Levitsky will explore the principal tropes in Rachel Hall's collection Heirlooms (2016) and Margo Singer's novel Underground Fugue (2017) to show how the placement and use of new tropes reconfigure the Holocaust for Third Generation Writers.The first work examines the idea of family inheritance as a sign and transmitter of trauma; the second text employs the overdetermined use of the fugue, musically and medically, as a form of renewal and displacement. Alan L. Berger will respond to the three presentations.

Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson illustrates the inescapable cultural memory of the Shoah transferred to a new generation of Jewish writers when a neurologist asks Zuckerman’s hospitalized mother to write her name. She responds not with "Selma" but “Holocaust.” The event is implanted in the fiber of postwar Jews carried forward by Zuckerman’s folding the paper she writes on and placing it in his wallet. In their continued and re-imagined Holocaust, the writers of New Jewish Fiction do the same.