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Kerman, Judith B. and John Edgar Browning, eds. The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film. Critical Perspectives. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014. 244pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-7864-5874-5. $40.00.
Is the fantastic a better tool for imagining the unimaginable, or do we "learn" and comprehend more about the Holocaust through realistic documentaries and witness narratives? Do the latter overwhelm us and are we "bludgeoned" into either disbelief or a desire to shake off the past? These are among the questions posed by Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning's edited collection, The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature. The volume consists of fourteen essays divided into three sections, a foreword by Jane Yolen, an editors' preface, and an introduction by Gary K. Wolfe. The editors state that the volume originated with a 1990 ICFA paper by Michael P. McCleary (which appears in an updated form here) and a subsequent special issue of this journal (four papers from that issue are included here).
For purposes of clarity, it should be understood from the outset that this volume defines Holocaust in the narrowest and most orthodox way, namely as the genocide of European Jews. None of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis-political and religious groups, homosexuals, Romani and the disabled, among others-figure in the essays with the exception of one homosexual character who makes a brief appearance in Vandana Saxena's examination of Jane Yolen's Briar Rose (1992).
The first section explores various textual sites and approaches to the fantastic used when writing the Holocaust. Judith B. Kerman's lead-off essay, entitled "Uses of the Fantastic in Literature of the Holocaust," sets the tone for the volume when she asks, "When the real is so fantastic, what literary effects will succeed in making it credible, and in helping the reader to comprehend its human meaning?" (14). Kerman implores writers not to flatten out the fantastic but to "penetrate it to its deeper meanings ... in every detail and movement of the story" (18). In the second essay, "The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature: Writing and Unwriting the Unbearable," Michael P. McCleary opines that irony and satire combined with the fantastic make us laugh at something grotesquely incompatible with laughter. He argues...