Distance and Indirectness in the Literature of Holocaust Memory in Hungary and in the United States (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Although the events of the Shoah took place in Central and Eastern European locations, its memorialization has become a global phenomenon. Regarding the amount of institutions and artistic representations concerning the Shoah, we could argue that the United States has grown into the absolute center of Holocaust memory.
With the imminent disappearance of witnesses, authors of the successive generations form the contemporary literature of the Holocaust, but in the center of their works, it is not the representation of historical events, but rather their distance from them. While in countries directly affected by the Nazi persecution, this distance is marked by the post-generations’ ambivalent experience of being-born-after, in the United States, the distance is both spatial and temporal.
This paper will focus on differences between the contemporary literatures of Holocaust memory in the United States and in Hungary, by comparing works of US-based authors, like Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Michael Chabon with Hungarian texts written by Gábor Zoltán, Pál Závada and Krisztina Tóth. While American novels tend to engage in topics, such as immigration experience, language and Jewish identity, the discussed Hungarian books rather focus on post-Holocaust history affected by the recent trauma and the afterlife of the landscapes of persecution. Both literatures are strongly marked by indirectness, however in American prose, it manifests mostly in the virtuoso use of imagination, as opposed to Hungarian texts, which are often characterized by their creative use of documents and data.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Eszter Vilmos is a fourth year Ph.D. student conducting research on the transnational literature of Holocaust memory at the University of Pécs. She has a bachelor’s degree in Hungarian and French literature and linguistics, and a master’s in Modern Hungarian Literature. Besides her academic endeavors focused on Holocaust studies and translation theory, Eszter often writes reviews on contemporary literature and theater. She spent the fall semester as a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York, NY with a Fulbright scholarship, under the supervision of Prof. Marianne Hirsch.