A growing body of scholarship is making visible the contribution of translators to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust. The discussion has tended to be theoretical or to concentrate on exposing the "distorted" translations of texts by important witnesses such as Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel. There is therefore a need for a positive, concrete, and contextually aware approach to the translation of Holocaust testimonies that acknowledges the achievements of translators while being sensitive to the consequences of particular translation strategies. Peter Davies's study proceeds from the assumption that translators are active co-creators whose work does not simply mediate a pre-existing text, but creates a representation of that text for a new readership in a specific context. Translators of Holocaust testimonies, then, provide a form of textual commentary that works through ideas about witnessing, historical truth, and the meaning of the Holocaust. In this way they are important co-creators of knowledge about the Holocaust and its legacy. The study focuses on translations between English and German, and from other languages (principally French, Russian, and Polish) into English and German. It works through a number of case studies, showing how making translation and its effects visible contributes to a clearer understanding of how knowledge about the Holocaust has been and continues to be created and mediated. Peter Davies is Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD--BIOGRAPHY Elie Wiesel was a towering presence on the world stage--a Nobel laureate, activist, adviser to world leaders, and the author of more than forty books, including the Oprah's Book Club selection Night. But when asked, Wiesel always said, "I am a teacher first." In fact, he taught at Boston University for nearly four decades, and with this book, Ariel Burger--devoted prot g , apprentice, and friend--takes us into the sacred space of Wiesel's classroom. There, Wiesel challenged his students to explore moral complexity and to resist the dangerous lure of absolutes. In bringing together never-before-recounted moments between Wiesel and his students, Witness serves as a moral education in and of itself--a primer on educating against indifference, on the urgency of memory and individual responsibility, and on the role of literature, music, and art in making the world a more compassionate place. Burger first met Wiesel at age fifteen; he became his student in his twenties, and his teaching assistant in his thirties. In this profoundly thought-provoking and inspiring book, Burger gives us a front-row seat to Wiesel's remarkable exchanges in and out of the classroom, and chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men over the decades as Burger sought counsel on matters of intellect, spirituality, and faith, while navigating his own personal journey from boyhood to manhood, from student and assistant, to rabbi and, in time, teacher. "Listening to a witness makes you a witness," said Wiesel. Ariel Burger's book is an invitation to every reader to become Wiesel's student, and witness.

The Holocaust presents an immense challenge to those who would represent it or teach it through fiction, film, or historical accounts. Even the testimonies of those who were there provide only a glimpse of the disaster to those who were not. Between Witness and Testimony investigates the difficulties inherent in the obligation to bear witness to events that seem not just unspeakable but also unthinkable. The authors examine films, fictional narratives, survivor testimonies, and the museums at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in order to establish an ethics of Holocaust representation. Traversing the disciplines of history, philosophy, religious studies, and literary and cultural theory, the authors suggest that while no account adequately provides access to what Adorno called "the extremity that eludes the concept," we are still obliged to testify, to put into language what history cannot contain.

An innovative reassessment of Holocaust testimony, revealing the dramatic ways in which the languages and places of postwar life inform survivor memory This groundbreaking work rethinks conventional wisdom about Holocaust testimony, focusing on the power of language and place to shape personal narrative. Oral histories of Lithuanian Jews serve as the textual base for this exploration. Comparing the remembrances of Holocaust victims who remained in Lithuania with those who resettled in Israel and North America after World War II, Pollin-Galay reveals meaningful differences based on where survivors chose to live out their postwar lives and whether their language of testimony was Yiddish, English, or Hebrew. The differences between their testimonies relate to notions of love, justice, community--and how the Holocaust did violence to these aspects of the self. More than an original presentation of yet-unheard stories, this book challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain.

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics.

Narratives of large-scale historical horror and trauma cross a terrible boundary in representation. What forms are adequate to such experience? What are the forms that such narratives actually take? Fridman is fascinated by the boundary that separates the representable from the unrepresentable and by the sense that literary works on either side of this boundary are governed by a different dynamic and set of rules from one another. Close readings of works by Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Jerzy Kosinski, Claude Lanzmann, Dan Pagis, Piotr Rawicz, André Schwarz-Bart, and Elie Wiesel explore the inventive means by which these Holocaust writers wrestle with experiences that, in a very real sense, cannot be put into words. A new reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness sets the stage for comparative and far-reaching literary insights into the notion and conception of traumatic narrative.

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

The book explores the concept of artistic witnessing as political activity. In which ways may art and artists bear witness to political events? The Contributors engage with dance, film, photography, performance, poetry and theatre and explore artistic witnessing as political activity in a wide variety of case studies.

This is the first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition. Through a series of chronological case studies grounded in primary source analysis, Amy Lynn Wlodarski analyses the compositional processes and conceptual frameworks that provide key pieces with their unique representational structures and critical receptions. The study examines works composed in a variety of musical languages - from Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic A Survivor from Warsaw to Steve Reich's minimalist Different Trains - and situates them within interdisciplinary discussions about the aesthetics and ethics of artistic witness. At the heart of this book are important questions about how music interacts with language and history; memory and trauma; and politics and mourning. Wlodarski's detailed musical and cultural analyses provide new models for the assessment of the genre, illustrating the benefits and consequences of musical Holocaust representation in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Belated Witness examines major works by Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick, Christa Wolf, and Paul Celan, focusing specifically on the unsettling configuration of birth-as-death trauma around which these texts are organized.