BOOK TALK: Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos

Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis UP, 2025). Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of Nazi ghettos wrote within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary genres, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the Gothic horror tale. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.

Sven-Erik Rose is a Professor of German and of Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, at the University of California, Davis.

Registration is requested:
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