"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.""-- Provided by publisher.
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