Art from the Ashes

A Holocaust Anthology

Plot

Ever since Theodor Adorno declared years ago that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz - an opinion he later modified - critics and readers have been wrestling with the question of whether it is possible or appropriate to translate the catastrophe of European Jewry into verbal or visual forms. How can we challenge the imagination to enter that realm of unimaginable horror? In Art from the Ashes, Lawrence L. Langer shows how, over the last fifty years, artists and writers have tried to come to grips with this monumental problem. Art from the Ashes provides the most far-reaching collection of art, drama, poetry, and prose about the Holocaust ever presented in a single volume. Through the works of men and women, Jews and non-Jews, figures famous and unknown, those who were there and those separated from the ordeal by time and space, this anthology offers a vision of the human reality of the disaster. Essays by familiar writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel accompany lesser-known efforts by Jankiel Wiernik and Frantisek Kraus; stories by Tadeusz Borowski and Ida Fink join fiction by neglected authors such as Isaiah Spiegel and Adolf Rudnicki; and extensive selections appear from the work of six poets - the renowned Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Abraham Sutzkever along with the less celebrated Dan Pagis, Jacob Glatstein, and Miklos Radnoti. Each selection (except for self-contained excerpts from ghetto journals and diaries) appears here in its complete form. Langer also includes in their entirety a novel by Aharon Appelfeld, a novella by Pierre Gascar, and Joshua Sobol's controversial drama Ghetto. In addition, this volume features a visual essay in the form of reproductionsof twenty works of art created in the Terezin concentration camp - which, as Langer notes, "further enrich and complicate our confrontation with the physical, moral, psychological, and emotional disruptions with which the Holocaust challenges us". The stunning immensity of the Holocaust looms over the twentieth century, overshadowing all our efforts to make sense of it. Art from the Ashes begins to pry open its mysteries, with outstanding selections collected by one of our finest commentators on the era.