Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English Spring 5-11-2012 In Their Words: Women's Holocaust Memoirs Shana Latimer Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/english_theses Recommended Citation Latimer, Shana, "In Their Words: Women's Holocaust Memoirs." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2012.edu/english_theses/129 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gsu. IN THEIR WORDS: WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS by SHANA LATIMER Under the Direction of Dr.
Tanya Caldwell ABSTRACT Sara Tuvel Bernstein’s The Seamstress and Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, both Holocaust memoirs, offer insight into the rise of violent anti- Semitism prior to World War II and the authors’ experiences in concentration camps. The purpose of this project is to better understand the unique trauma women experienced during the Holocaust and the impact of that trauma on their literary responses. INDEX WORDS: Holocaust, Trauma studies, Women, Memoirs IN THEIR WORDS: WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS by SHANA LATIMER A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012 Copyright by Shana Latimer 2012 IN THEIR WORDS: WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS by SHANA LATIMER Committee Chair: Tanya Caldwell Committee: Michael Galchinsky Renée Schatteman Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2012 iv Dedication For Joseph, Callan, and Chase Latimer, and for my mother, Gail Beam. v Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr.
Tanya Caldwell without whom this thesis would never have been written. Also, thank you to my committee members, Dr. Michael Galchinsky and Dr. Renée Schatteman, for your thoughtful feedback.
I would like to thank my husband, Joseph, for his unwavering support in all my academic endeavors, and my children, Callan and Chase, who went on the journey with me. My mother, Gail Beam, listened when my heart was overflowing. And, lastly, to Jessica Ford, thank you for always being there. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements.
1 2 Trauma and Latency. 42 1 1 Introduction The initial exposure to Holocaust literature often comes in a classroom. As a result, the literature embraced by academia directly affects public Holocaust literacy. For years, educators at varying academic levels have regularly engaged their students with two texts, The Diary of Anne Frank and Night, as a way to facilitate discussion about the Holocaust.
Samuel Totten states that the narrow academic focus on specific texts and a lack of teachable material served as the impetus for Teaching Holocaust Literature, a pedagogical resource published in 2001 and edited by him, that seeks to enhance knowledge about the Holocaust using a variety of pedagogi- cal tools and lesser known texts. In an analysis of his research, he comments specifically about The Diary of Anne Frank and Night: The pedagogical pieces I did locate…mainly dealt with The Diary of Anne Frank and, to a lesser extent, Elie Wiesel’s Night. Many of the lessons on Anne Frank’s diary treated it as if it were the only piece of Holocaust literature available….Furthermore, most of the pedagogical pieces dealing with the Diary neglected to situate Anne’s story within its historical context, thus leaving students bereft of key insights into why the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews. (Totten 1) Concern about the narrow focus of academia with regard to Holocaust literature persists, alt- hough perhaps in a different way than Totten initially recognized.
The inclusion of The Diary of Anne Frank as a primary means of facilitating discussion, specifically about women in the Holo- caust, is concerning because the suffering so many women experienced is absent in Frank’s dia- ry. 2 The love of The Diary of Anne Frank, in some ways the embodiment of absence – ab- sence of language to describe the horrors of the Holocaust, absence of humiliation, abuse, and death – is its appeal. Elaine Culbertson, a scholar on the Holocaust and Holocaust literature, states about The Diary of Anne Frank: The book skirts the real issues of the Holocaust because the story takes place apart from them…. [U]sing a book like The Diary of Anne Frank provides a very skewed view of that world, and does not really accomplish what I believe should be the goals of Holocaust educators: to provide a glimpse of the world that was lost, to show how actions by responsible individuals can make a difference, and to empower students to believe that they do make decisions in their lives that will affect them and those around them.
I do not believe that Anne Frank’s diary can accomplish these goals. What it can do is to provide a very sentimental picture of one girl’s experiences. (65) One might ask in what ways a reader of Anne’s diary is enlightened about the world in which Anne lived and, ultimately, died. The Diary of Anne Frank is a problematic text insofar as its narrow scope continues to be used as a primary tool to understand a complex event that occurs largely outside the framework of its narrative.
In the same vein, although Night is a haunting account of what occurred in Auschwitz and its lasting effects on author Elie Wiesel, it is from a distinctly male perspective. Vasvári notes that “Holocaust scholarship still tends to privilege the Holocaust experience of men as universal and is reluctant to acknowledge testimony that does not follow preconceived gender stereotypes and suitable female behavior or pre-existing narratives of survival” (2). The initial privilege of the Holocaust narrative extended to men and, in the case of Anne, a young, 3 unthreatening female. The privilege extended to some narratives over others is too complex to adequately analyze here; however, it derives from the patriarchal ideology of a pre-feminist world that valued male testimony as authoritative.
In Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forché undertakes the enormous responsibility of compiling poetry that responds to the major wars and human rights violations of the twentieth century. She offers a brief analysis of the included poets: This collection reflects the abundance of works in translation from European languages, but unfortunately underscores the scarcity of works translated from Asian and African literatures. In addition, fewer women poets seem to have survived the horrors of our century than their male counterparts, and many fewer have been translated. (31) Forché does not offer reasons for or further analysis of why women authors, in particular, do not survive in rates comparable to their male counterparts or why there is a gender disparity in trans- lated works.
Her commentary on the subject is limited to what is quoted. Despite the fact that many Holocaust survivors’ native language is not English, Louise O. Vasvári notes, “It is in Eng- lish that most Holocaust life writing has been written and published because so many survivors ended up in emigration in English-speaking countries; in addition, most scholarly work on the Holocaust has appeared in English…so that English has turned out to be the lingua franca of Holocaust Studies” (2). However, Vasvári also notes the difficulty in locating texts written prior to emigration as well as the difficulty in accessing those that have not been translated.
Forché acknowledges the problem of underrepresentation, specifically with regard to female voices, and Vasvári addresses the problem by compiling a bibliography of Holocaust literature written by women; however, there is little analysis of the space in between the acknowledgement and ad- 4 dress. Scholarship exists about the suffering of women in the Holocaust and memoirs exist that painstakingly detail their suffering; however, there is a dearth of scholarship linking the traumat- ic events of the Holocaust to the underrepresentation of female voices. Cathy Caruth, a leading scholar in trauma studies, examines the possibility of a lapse be- tween the traumatic event and the survivor’s ability to revisit the event. Caruth defines trauma as an “overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (181).
She further develops the idea of latency and describes it as “the period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent” (Caruth 183). I argue that upon liberation many survivors of the Holocaust, male and female, entered a period of laten- cy; however, the manifestation of latency appears to be gendered. Some male survivors of the Holocaust, including well-known authors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, wrote poetry and autobiographies in the immediate aftermath of the liberation; how- ever, forty years after the Holocaust Primo Levi died in what many classify as a suicide and, up- on hearing of his death, Elie Wiesel famously stated, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.” Levi’s latency phase did not prevent him from writing about his experiences, but he was not able to process his experiences in a way that facilitated recovery from them. One could argue that his exit from the latency phase resulted in his death.
Conversely, for many female survivors of the Holocaust, this latency phase manifested it- self in a profound silence that prevented them from recording their experiences. Not until years later, upon exiting this latency phase, did they begin recording their experiences. In Women in the Holocaust, Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer examine the role of gender in the Holocaust.
Their analysis does not make a judgment about the severity of suffering, and neither do I, but 5 they acknowledge differences in the effects of the Holocaust experience. In the introduction, Weitzman and Ofer ask, “Why women? Why should a book on the Holocaust – which targeted all Jews for annihilation irrespective of their sex or age or any other social characteristic – focus on women?” Their answer mirrors my reason for this project, “This book shows how questions about gender lead us to a richer and more finely nuanced understanding of the Holocaust” (1). The purpose of this analysis is not a quantitative judgment of trauma but an exploration of the relationship between particular traumatic events and the absent voices in a literary genre that owes its existence in part to their suffering. The foundation of my argument is predicated upon a close examination of the historical, religious, and cultural contexts in which Jewish women experienced the Holocaust.
My primary texts include The Seamstress by Sara Tuvel Bernstein and Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz by Rena Kornreich Gelissen. The Seamstress chronicles the life of Sara Tuvel Bern- stein (nee Seren Tuvel) from her Orthodox Jewish childhood, through the rise of violent anti- Semitism, to her imprisonment in Ravensbrück concentration camp and her life post-liberation. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz gives fewer details about the childhood of Rena Kornreich Gelissen, although she does highlight specific details of her Orthodox Jewish upbring- ing. The majority of her text details the three years Rena and her sister, Danka, spent in Ausch- witz.
My first chapter introduces my primary texts, The Seamstress and For Rena: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, and outlines the relevant aspects of trauma studies including Cathy Caruth’s expansion of the concept of latency and how latency created a vacuum in Holocaust literature. The information gleaned from close readings will be used to support the theory that latency born out of trauma informs a delay many female survivors experienced prior to recording their Holo- 6 caust experiences. My second chapter analyzes the construction of response from two perspec- tives – Sara’s and Rena’s responses to the traumas they experienced and, later, their literary re- sponses. This chapter uses excerpts from the texts to understand how the patriarchal world in which the authors grew up affected their lives after liberation.