Books in the Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series

Gisella Perl's memoir is an extraordinarily candid account of women's extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. It was the first memoir by a woman survivor and established the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous.

This book argues that both Franz Kafka's personality and his literary activity were perceived by himself as exemplifying the modern Jewish predicament of aspiring to modernity while being tied to a past-civilization, thus finding oneself struggling in a vacuum.

This book explores contemporary writers' use of nonrepresentational techniques, similar to those of ancient rabbis who composed classical Midrash, as they grapple with the violence of our era. With particular attention paid to Holocaust literature, the book identifies an important trend in literature about collective trauma.

This book engages with cultural memory in literature and other media of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors who are confronted with language loss, language acquisition and multiple issues of translation of inherited and received cultural memory.

In this book, scholars with expertise in various national literatures and cultures explore how the Holocaust has been represented in novels, memoirs, film, television, and architecture. This book provides a unique vantage point for the scholar and student to compare how national context impacts representations of the Holocaust.

This volume including eight essays and an interview offers new insight into Daniel Mendelsohn's first three memoirs (The Elusive Embrace, The Lost, and An Odyssey). The authors analyze how Mendelsohn's nonfiction brilliantly intertwines self-writing with reflections on ancient myths and their continued impact on self-reflection and representation.

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman's Experience is the first-person account by Jewish journalist Sara Nomberg-Przytyk of surviving Auschwitz then rising to various leadership roles in the newly-formed postwar Polish Communist Party. Building a just and equitable Poland for the common Pole through communism was her dream. The reality was neither simple nor successful. Working for heavily censored newspapers and periodicals, Nomberg-Przytyk witnessed firsthand the inner workings of a communist government plagued by the same Kafkaesque bureaucracy and antisemitism that she had been certain it would fix. Her memoir provides a comprehensive account as she slowly changed from enthusiastic practitioner to witness of a system that failed her and many others. This is the first published edition of this text, originally recorded as oral testimony in Polish but translated into English by Paula Parsky, and includes a critical introduction by the co-editors, American and Polish academics Holli Levitsky and Justyna Wlodarczyk, as well as extensive annotations.

The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust collects narratives of Bulgarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. Through the analysis of eye-witness testimonies, archival documents, photographs, and researchers' investigations, the authors weave a complex tapestry of voices that were previously underrepresented, ignored, and denied. Taken together, the collected memories offer an alternative perspective that counters official accounts and corroborates war crimes.