Sun Turned To Darkness: Memory And Recovery In The Holocaust Memoir

Book Summary

In examining the recorded memoirs of fifty Holocaust survivors, David Patterson draws on the teaching of the sacred texts of Jewish tradition and the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas. That memory, it is argued, brings out three aspects of post-Holocaust Jewry. The first is a recovery of tradition: targeted for destruction was not only the body of Israel but also the soul of Israel, as that soul was defined by God, Torah, and sacred history. The second sense in which recovery is examined is as a recovery from an illness: the illness here is the illness of indifference -- as it was manifested in the silence of heaven and earth throughout the event. Finally, the memoirs reveal the open-ended nature of recovery as a process that has no resolution: the survivors emerge from the camps, but the camps stay with the survivors and cast their shadow over the world. Readers are transformed into witnesses who then face a recovery of the sacred, indifference, and a never-ending process of remembrance.

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