This is a conflict that the contemporary Jewish-American author Cynthia Ozick addresses and opens up in her essays and fiction. However, for all the analysis and literature on the subject, it seems the ‘Holocaust Writer’ is still trapped within the circularity of the debate between representation and silence. Indeed, Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that “After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric” is often taken as a point of departure and relentlessly quoted by literary scholars when discussing this genre. There has been much critical debate surrounding the topic of ‘Holocaust Literature’ and the impossibility, even brutality, of attempting to represent the unimaginable. An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make history, to tell, to explain. Otherwise the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate.
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