Poetry after Auschwitz: Emotion and culture in fictional representations of the holocaust

Abstract

The German‐Jewish thinker T. W. Adorno believed that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. In fact, the response of many survivors of the Nazi Holocaust has been the opposite of artistic expression: silence. This paper is concerned with the emotional undercurrent in the fiction of three Jewish writers who, defying Adorno's opprobrium, built international reputations through ‘poetry’ not only after, but concerning, the European Jewish experience in the Second World War. The dual pull of testimony and silence is among their primary concerns. Jerzy Kosinski was a Polish Jew; Elie Wiesel and Aharon Appelfeld were born in Romania. Three well‐known novels by these authors, The Painted Bird (1965); The Gates of the Forest (1964) and Tzili: The Story of a Life (1983), describe the travels of young Jewish refugees, in each case clearly alter egos for the authors, who were themselves child survivors. Three major themes emerge in these novels: exile, identity and the power and limitation of language. The paper suggests that all three themes are uniquely Jewish metaphors for survivor guilt, and that this guilt is shared by the writers themselves.