Zelman Skalov's Novel of and from the Warsaw Ghetto

• In Event: New Approaches to Holocaust Literature

Abstract

For obvious reasons, the most prevalent genres of ghetto literature were short: poetry, reportage, short story, and testimony. In fact, although we know that others wrote novels or parts of novels in Nazi ghettos, Zelman Skalov's Yiddish language DER HAKNKRAYTS [Swastika] is the only novel that has come down to us from the Warsaw (or any other) ghetto. It depicts the experiences of the residents of a Warsaw, and eventually a Warsaw ghetto, tenement from 1939 until the German invasion of the USSR in summer 1941. Written virtually concurrently with the events it depicts, Skalov's novel renders the German invasion of Poland, the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, hunger and epidemics. It was published in Yiddish in 1954, and a German version (more an adaptation than a translation, as it strays quite markedly from the original) was included in the 1966 anthology of prose from the Warsaw ghetto, GHETTO. BERICHTE AUS DEM WARSCHAUER GHETTO 1939-1945, published by the East German CDU's Union-Verlag. The work has never been translated into English, and it has received extremely little critical attention. In this paper, I explore Skalov's attempt to hold a literary mirror to the experience of roughly the first year of the Warsaw ghetto. What work does literature, and specifically the novel, perform in this instance as a hermeneutic lens for negotiating extreme experiences and as a cultural means of structuring and rendering these experiences intelligible and meaningful? What resources does the novelistic genre offer for depicting individual and collective experiences of radical destitution and removal from wider society, and even the wider human community? How does the novelistic enterprise hold up, or unravel, as the events depicted increasingly belie the humanism on which the novel as a cultural institution is predicated? How does the temporality of this novelistic work reflect and negotiate the unfolding and increasingly catastrophic time in which it was written, and how, finally, do the thematic concerns and temporal dynamics of Skalov's novel compare to novels about the Warsaw Ghetto written after WWII such as John Hersey's THE WALL (1950) and Bogdan Wojdowski's BREAD FOR THE DEPARTED (1971)?

Author

• Sven-Erik Rose, University of California, Davis