Indiana University Press Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Jewish Literature and Culture)

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprun illuminate the discussion. Toker’s two-fold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience. She provides insight into how fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony, how references to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers, and how these references form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of Gulag literature and this text presents new thinking about how Gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil. Review For many scholars already ensconced in the field of camp literature, Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps may serve as a platform from which to reconsider stale assumptions and definitions. For a great many future scholars, it will be a launching pad.--Benjamin Paloff "Antisemitism Studies" Toker writes with erudition, nuance, and complexity that few other scholars could match on this topic.--Katherine R. Jolluck "The Russian Review" This is a welcome new approach to camp testimony, and many such comparative accounts will surely follow.-- "Times Higher Education" Review There are very few scholars who could write such a book―who have such an immense and highly competent knowledge of both areas―the literature of the Nazi camps and the Gulag―and nothing of this scope and magnitude has yet been written. Source: Jeffrey Wallen, author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture From the Author Leona Toker is Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is author of Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission and Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. About the Author Leona Toker is Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is author of Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission and Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors.