“My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust”: “Facing” Black and Jewish Experience in The Pawnbroker, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood
What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbroker—both...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2004
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| In: |
Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2004, Volume: 18, Issue: 1, Pages: 46-67 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbroker—both the novel and the film version—and offers a reading of Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl as a polemical response to The Pawnbroker. Two Holocaust-related novels by the West Indian writer Caryl Phillips are then examined as models of how a literary text can enact a “facing” of black and Jewish experience through the postmodern technique of narrative fragmentation and juxtaposition. |
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| ISSN: | 1476-7937 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dch039 |