16 - The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature

Summary

This chapter discusses Holocaust in American Jewish fiction by analyzing the book, The Ghost Writer for two reasons. First, it is the American text that first establishes the Holocaust as a topic of serious philosophical and cultural discussion. Second, it creates one of the dominant tropes that will accompany the Holocaust subject through its transmigrations and transformations in American writing: the idea of the Holocaust as a ghost. The chapter shows how the American authors' texts move from a position of melancholic obsession with the Holocaust to a place of mourning its victims. Among the Holocaust texts considered, Ozick's The Shawl is the best representation of the phenomenon of blocked mourning. The United States of America provides a creative future for American Jews, even if the ghosts of the Holocaust may still continue to haunt the Jewish imagination and, perhaps create post-Holocaust aesthetic that is specifically Jewish American.