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This book engages with an extensive corpus of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah written from 1939 to the present day. The study places the poetry in its different social, political, and historical contexts, and argues for its legitimate place in current debates concerning French-language literary representations of the Shoah. Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Why This Book? -- The Corpus -- Poetry Matters -- Critical Paradigms and Theoretical Considerations -- Methodology -- Chapter 1. The Jewish Poetry of Resistance, 1939-1946 -- O the Rotten Scoundrels -- The "Invisible" Jewish Voices of Spiritual Resistance -- Saying It as It Is: Voicing Jewish Persecution -- Chapter 2. Shock, Accusation, Commemoration, 1946-1956 -- Betrayal and the Capital Defection of Humanity -- Of Soap and Scream -- Voices from the Camps -- Voices from the Edge -- Chapter 3. Intermezzo, 1960-1964 -- Return to Auschwitz and Treblinka -- Memories of Destruction -- Chapter 4. Memory and Anti-Shoah Denial, 1970-1996 -- The Poetry of Chrestomathy -- Pursuing the Pedagogical Impulse -- The Adolescent Experience and Its Trace -- The Traumatized Child -- It Happened: Family Corpses and Sulfurous Sunflowers -- Chapter 5. Poetry at the Turn of the Millennium, 2001-2008 -- Back to the War, Again and Again and Again -- Like Father Like Son -- Contrasting Voices of the Insatiable Fire -- Toward a New Idiom -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index -- Series Index. "In this groundbreaking study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah, Gary D. Mole engages with an extensive heterogeneous corpus of poetry by more than forty poets active after the war in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Quebec but originally coming from Eastern Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Some were adolescents or adults during the war, either in hiding, interned or deported, first-hand witnesses to the Nazi persecution of European Jews. Others were hidden children, survivors writing of their buried traumatic experiences many years later. And a second-generation born after the war became postmemory proxy witnesses. Broadly chronological in approach, the book places the poetry in its different social, political, and historical contexts, underlines the specific geographical locations of the authors, and then offers close thematic, formal, stylistic, and linguistic readings of the selected texts, highlighting some of the major aesthetic and ethical problems raised. Lucidly written, this book throws critical light, for scholars and nonspecialists, on a rich unjustly neglected corpus, arguing convincingly for its inclusion in current debates on French-language literary representations of the Shoah and more widely in what is commonly referred to as "Holocaust Poetry.""--
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